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11.10.05
Opportunities In The CRM Market
 By
Sanjay Kumar
Earlier when organizations' large IT projects concentrated on Main Frames, ERP,
MRP and SCM systems, a new concept of "Front Office applications" changed focus
to Customers resulting in the emergence of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
applications.
CRM helped Organizations in improving efficiency and better services to Customers.
CRM was the mantra for surviving in the competitive market by focusing on Customer
needs. To help achieve this, there were many CRM solutions that came out in the
Market. Such solutions included generic CRM solutions focused on sales and services
to Industry specific solutions that embedded the best practices for those industries.
Such solutions helped Software developers and Software vendors in generating large
revenues in terms of Sales and Implementation of such applications.
Now most of the large Organizations have opted, implemented and more or less stabilized
one or another application with its core and customized CRM functionality. This
article explores further opportunities that are available in CRM Market. Enterprise
Application Integration (EAI): Once a CRM solution is implemented, The Organization
needs to focus on integrating it with other applications. There are diverse applications
and technologies used in an Organization that need to interact with each other.
Integrating such applications will help in sharing business critical data and
help improve in better business efficiency by reducing the time that is required
to spend on gathering and sharing such information. This brings out the opportunity
of Application to Application (A2A) and Business to Business (B2B) integration
using EAI strategies like Point to Point, Hub and Spoke and Distributed Messaging.
Upgrade: There are many large Organizations who have heavily customized CRM solutions
which they have continued using for years. There are new / latest versions of
such applications available. As of now there are many CRM solution providers who
are supporting old versions of their application, but how long is a Question.
Once those Organizations decide to upgrade or move to later / latest versions
of the application, this will open up new market.
Small and Medium Enterprise (SME): Although CRM solutions have been implemented
by most of the large Organizations, SME segment is still vastly open and lot of
potential to be capitalized.
Hosted Solutions: There are many small Organizations who neither have capacity
nor infrastructure to buy and implement CRM solution. Such small Organizations
will prefer to opt for hosted solutions and pay based on the usage.
Redesign the wheel instead of Reinventing it - New Technology Architecture Changes
like Service Oriented Architecture is requiring redesigning of the CRM solution
architecture. This has opened up new market for Software Vendors and System Integrators.
About the Author:
Sanjay Kumar is Siebel 7 & Siebel 7.7 certified and Microsoft certified having
15 years of I.T. experience in Analysis, Design, Programming, Tech Support, RDBMS
technology, Implementation, Integration, Testing and Project Management on Client
Server, Host based and Web based systems for various applications, technologies
and various Industry specific domains like Stock Market Investment Banking... |
