Published on the 30/05/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Salesforce is the world’s most popular CRM with SAP ranking second – but in Australia SAP ranks a relatively lowly fourth after sales slumped in 2015. What gives?…
The march of cloud computing giant Salesforce has been relentless since the company launched in 1999. Piggybacking on demand from the marketing department for an effective customer relationship management tool that business users could harness, the company also spawned the rise of shadow IT where enterprise solutions were selected and paid for out of budgets other than IT’s.
SAP meanwhile was a long time IT solution which only latterly moved into the cloud. Nevertheless and despite the SAP juggernaut, internationally SAP has commanded second place in the CRM market.
According to Gartner’s most recent statistics released this month in 2015 Salesforce commanded 19.6 per cent of the CRM market – up from 18.2 per cent a year earlier. SAP meanwhile retained second slot globally, but its market share declined slightly from 13 to 10.2 per cent – this despite the overall CRM software market growing by a pretty robust 12.3 per cent to $US26.3 billion.
Australia meanwhile has quite a different market lineup. Salesforce is still at number one with 16.3 per cent share, but number two here is Oracle, then Genesys, followed by SAP in fourth place with 3.6 per cent stake. If Microsoft continues to enjoy the growth rate it did this year, and SAP CRM sales continue to decline locally in 2016, SAP will next year fall to the bottom of the top five table.
Microsoft has already taken its toll on SAP in New Zealand where Salesforce had 23.7 percent of the market in 2015, followed by Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and IBM.
So why is SAP performing well globally in CRM sales but less so locally?
Gartner’s regional CRM analyst, Yanna Dharmastira, based in Indonesia, explained the apparent anomaly to iStart as partly due to the customer service and support skew in CRM sales in Australia, compared to the rest of the world, which favoured Genesys’ speciality. According to Dharmastira 42 per cent of all CRM sales in Australia fall into this sub-segment.
She said that while SAP was trying to break out and attract new customers to its CRM offering, its “low hanging fruit” remained its own ERP customers which might be looking to add CRM. The challenge of course is that many marketing departments might have already found Salesforce under their own steam.
