Salesforce Takes CRM Leadership From SAP

Salesforce has zoomed past SAP to take the lead in the customer relationship management (CRM) worldwide market, according to a Gartner report.

The Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2012 study shows that Salesforce experienced a growth in revenue by 26 percent, compared to just 0.1 percent for SAP. The top five CRM vendors accounted for nearly half of the market revenue, with Salesforce holding 14 percent, SAP accounting for 12.9 percent, and third placed Oracle with 11.1 percent.

Healthy growth

Joanne Correia, a Gartner vice president, pointed out that overall market growth in 2012, was three times the average for all enterprise software: “highlighting how CRM is at the height of the Nexus of Forces storm”.

Part of the reason for SAP’s poor showing last year ws not only the depressed state of the European market, but also the fact that Gartner figures are calculated in US dollars, so the situation was exacerbated by unfavourable exchange rates due to a weakened Euro. Although SAP was not the worldwide leader, it was still the largest vendor in terms of revenue in Western and Eastern Europe.

Although North America and Western Europe dominate the CRM market, accounting for more than 80 percent of total software revenue, substantial growth was noted in the Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Middle East and Africa regions. Overall, there was particularly strong demand for software as a service (SaaS) which took 40 percent of total software revenue for CRM in 2012. Correia put this down to organisations seeking easier-to-deploy alternatives to replace legacy systems or to provide alternative complementary departmental services.

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