Published on the 12/02/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
The CRM software company has announced its intention to invest in the expansion of its market share in the Asia Pacific region by replicating its successful American model…
The Asia Pacific expansion will be helped by the addition of Wayne Goss, who joined the team on the 2nd January this year in the newly appointed role of Regional Sales Director for Asia Pacific. Goss has experience in strategic IT management roles, including leading the square kilometre array project, setting up the Canterbury University Blue Gene supercomputer, and most recently being as IBM’s national competitive, strategy and engagement leader where he developed strategies to address traditional and emerging competitors for all of IBM’s brands in Australia and New Zealand.
Speaking to iStart yesterday about his appointment Goss said he thinks the CRM segment is an exciting area of opportunity. According to Gartner Research, CRM will represent the largest segment of enterprise software by 2017— eclipsing even ERP and analytics — increasing to a$US36.5 billion worldwide market. While the research firm shows that there are currently 20 million CRM users globally, Goss referred to “the case of the missing zero”, saying that, using LinkedIn as an indicator, there are likely more than 200 million prospective CRM users worldwide.
Last week, Sugar CRM also announced it had achieved more than 75 percent year-over-year revenue growth globally with 17 quarters of consecutive growth in 2013. Locally, Sugar CRM has 300-plus customers across A/NZ and, in the last 12 months, New Zealand was its strongest growing region with more than 55 percent growth.
“SugarCRM plans to aggressively invest into the Asia Pacific region in the next two years,” he said, adding that it will be soon be setting up a head office in Sydney from which he will operate, as well as exploring and enhancing channel partnerships.
According to Goss, SugarCRM has traditionally had good growth in the Asia Pacific region, but it has been largely organic. Now, his mandate is to replicate the company’s successful American strategy that has seen the likes of Goldman Sachs & Co make a $US40 million equity investment in the company in August last year which will go towards funding the global expansion and improving the product’s user experience and social and mobile components.
“My vision is for the Asia Pacific region to be on a par with the Americas and MEA. We’re about halfway there,” he said.
“It’s about making sure we’ve got the capacity. We need to invest heavily in this region and optimise our partners,” he added.
Goss says he is already seeing increasing interest from enterprise clients, thanks to an IMB deal to deploy SugarCRM for its approximately 65,000 users.
“In the last 30 days we have had some very, very large enterprise clients approach us through Deloitte and IBM,” he commented, but was not at liberty to divulge more.
