CRM mid market

Not sure I can help you with sourcing data or listings of relevant target companies but I do have some thoughts on mid-market CRM and Siebel…

Depending on who you talk to the enterprise CRM market is currently growing at between 40-130% per annum. Certainly if you look at the growth of the top CRM vendors last year it is nearer the top end of these growth projections. Globally the bigger players like Interact, Pivotal and Onyx had a very good year. Companies like Pega or any number of German CRM players, however, did less well. This would suggest that growth in the mid-market was more conservative i.e. around 40%.

The “mid-market” could be understood in terms of company revenue as you suggest or perhaps by size of CRM implementation: perhaps between 10-500 users.

I’ll certainly be following Siebel’s progress with the mid-market with interest. Typically for Siebel they seem to be going after everything aggressively. Similarly to other big players, notably Oracle, Siebel is positioning itself as being about e-business, not just CRM – it’s company strapline is now simply ‘eBusiness’. The acquisition of OpenSite Technologies in 2000 was indicative as this provided Siebel with the e-commerce capabilities necessary for e-business more broadly. Similarly to Oracle and PeopleSoft/Vantive, Siebel is also actively pursuing wireless (including deals with Sprint, Palm and Nokia) and ASP solutions.

Siebel’s release of Siebel eBusiness 2000 Midmarket Edition which you refer to is an interesting move towards the mid-market where there are a higher volume of customers.

Siebel seems well entrenched at the highest end of the market (with the largest market share at around 18%), but there are things that concern me about their foray into the mid-market. Whilst it is undeniable that mid-market companies will need to deliver complex CRM solutions to meet increasing customer expectations (i.e. play the big boys game) I don’t see how offering a cut back version of a more complex product set will achieve this. More important than product features and cost, the issues to address between mid-market and large organisations are things such as cultural differences, change management, operational and management structures, corporate governance, programme management, business functions and processes. I don’t know how far Siebel have thought this through and how they are supporting implementation partners to understand and address these kinds of issues?

To date the costs of both CRM software and project delivery have been out of reach of the mid-market. The problem is that the
mid-market does need sophisticated solutions, it's just that no one has really worked out how to deliver at acceptable costs.
This will change as many existing and emerging vendors find it too hard to compete in the enterprise space and so go after the mid-market. It just doesn’t feel like Siebel need go there - enterprise CRM has a lot of mileage in it yet. How many large organisations have matured to the point where they can deliver multi-channel, personalised customer experiences driven from a single customer view across all systems? The enterprise market will be struggling with this for a good five or six years to come. In that time the mid market will be trying to level the playing field. But Siebel? I guess I’d be pretty worried going up against that gorilla.

On 15:3:47 18 April 2001 soovojit wrote:
>The mid market seems to be such a hot thing that Siebel
>has gone ahead and developed a product for this one(rather
>it tinkered with its old offerings to cut down some of the
>functionality). But can anyone give me some idea as to how
>to go about identifying this so called mid market? which
>site will give me comprehensive data or listings of
>companies with revenue in the scale of$25mn-$250mn ?
>Thanx