Published on the 31/05/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Salesforce is the world’s most popular CRM with SAP ranking second – but in Australia and New Zealand SAP ranks more lowly. 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 19.7 percent of the global CRM market – up from 18.2 percent a year earlier. SAP meanwhile retained second slot globally, but its market share declined slightly from 13 to 10.2 percent – this despite the overall CRM software market growing by a pretty robust 12.3 percent to $US26.3 billion.
Australia and New Zealand meanwhile have quite a different market lineup. In Australia Salesforce is still at number one with 16.3 percent share, but number two is Oracle, then Genesys, followed by SAP in fourth place with a 3.6 percent 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 19.6 percent of the market in 2015, followed by Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and IBM.
In New Zealand Gartner said that Salesforce has seen revenues grow by an astonishing 48.4 percent in 2015 compared to 2014. Microsoft also grew strongly in the CRM market with revenues surging 35.6 percent to give it a 7.2 percent market share.
SAP meanwhile saw growth fall back to 10.6 percent in 2015, compared to 26.3 percent the year earlier. It currently holds fourth slot on NZ’s CRM ladder with 5.4 percent share, compared to Oracle, which despite a 5.5 per cent contraction in revenues still holds 9.9 percent of the market.
So why is SAP performing well globally in CRM sales but less so in ANZ?
Gartner’s regional CRM analyst, Yanna Dharmastira, based in Indonesia, explained 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.
