one to watch
For the second year in a row, BPMonline came in as our One to Watch for the midmarket, earning a 4.0 in company direction. The company has drawn praise for its “good workflow support,” John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association, states. “BPMonline is doing a great job providing CRM solutions in a rules-based approach. They continue to eat into Pegasystems’ business,” Wang says. It also averaged a 3.9 in the cost score, and that value matters to midmarket customers. —S.S.
The Market
The midmarket of CRM is “an area for opportunistic growth” for vendors trying to win over customers, explains Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group. While large enterprises have long been proponents of CRM, the “underpenetrated” midmarket includes businesses with two different types of needs. “At the upper end, many of the companies are sophisticated and growing to the enterprise level, and have growing pains kinds of problems,” Greenberg says, while the lower end is “coming out of small businesses, which has a different set of needs. There’s lot of available real estate in that market.”
The Leaders
With its emphasis on keeping all of a company’s data in one place and getting a “single version of the truth,” NetSuite has captured the midmarket and beyond. “NetSuite is a preferred CRM vendor for retailers, manufacturers, and other sectors in the midmarket space, primarily as a result of its powerful connection between front-office CRM and back-office ERP, which utilize the same database as a system of record,” says Leslie Ament, senior vice president and principal analyst at Hypatia Research Group. “NetSuite’s new focus on CRM at the order level should be on the short list for companies seeking end-to-end ERP and CRM cloud suites,” adds Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Their focus on e-commerce continues to be a good move and distinguishes them from the pack in that growing area,” CRM Essentials partner Brent Leary states.
Oracle earned points from Jim Dickie, managing partner of CSO Insights, for its “robust analytics and mobile support,” as well as its cloud and on-premises options. He has seen the Sales Cloud become more attractive to mid-tier markets. Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, concurs. “We’re seeing Oracle deploying successfully on the midmarket level,” noting a successful deployment of Oracle Sales Cloud combined with Eloqua (part of the Marketing Cloud) with 20 users that took two weeks to complete. That’s the kind of implementation that helped Oracle place on the midmarket leaderboard.
Salesforce.com dropped from the top spot this year. While it has the most brand recognition and strong scores of 4.3 in company direction and depth of functionality, there are concerns about cost, especially for a cloud company. Salesforce.com posted a 3.4 in the cost category, its lowest score. One analyst has heard Salesforce.com customers complain about feeling nickel and dimed by the vendor, with added costs for additional users and features that add up and have had an impact on customer satisfaction. The product itself still draws raves, especially for its open platform. The “AppExchange is a great asset for Salesforce.com users,” Dickie says, and its open platform means lots of integrations and flexibility.
The center of the midmarket is “a real SugarCRM sweet spot. This is where they belong,” Greenberg states. It’s a “good option for companies that want to customize,” Dickie observes. That said, Wettemann has reservations about SugarCRM’s focus on highly customized products, which makes it more difficult to upgrade to its newer solutions. The latest Sugar UX, with its focus on mobile and ability to pull in contextual information, “moves them further away from being viewed as an open-source CRM vendor to being a CRM vendor who can compete with anybody when it comes to the [sales force automation] side of the house,” Leary counters.
The Winner
Microsoft Dynamics CRM has a growing presence below the enterprise level, and that forward momentum allowed it to unseat Salesforce.com this year. “The Microsoft partners have done a great job selling Dynamics into the SMB space, and most customers we talk to are happy if not ecstatic with the solutions,” Wang states. Microsoft also trounced Salesforce.com in the cost category, with a 4.1 rating to Salesforce’s 3.4 rating. Plus, its “new announcement for Office 365, Azure, and Windows 8 integration opens up choices for the customer base,” Wang says. Dickie adds praise for its “improvements in interface and mobile support.” The leadership of Microsoft and its strategic acquisitions, including that of Parature, gave it a company direction score of 4.2. —Sarah Sluis