A number of analysts have weighed in this week with divergent opinions on where the CRM market is going. Computerwire stakes their opinion on “survival of the biggest” and feels that the spoils are going to go to the one-stop-shops like SAP.
Denis Pombriant, on the other hand, is on record “believing that the current state of the market in enterprise software is at a high point of complexity and that the next move is not greater consolidation but greater flexibility through modularity and improved integration facilities.”
I’m going to line up with Denis on this one. The all-in-one solution game is zero-sum, and eventually will lead to price-cutting and unnatural acts between the big players, as they eventually resort to squabbling over an ever-shrinking number of large customers.
Flexibility and ease are going to be the keys — and that goes for flexibility and ease in understanding the solutions, selling the need internally, getting purchasing approvals, performing rollouts, and education of customers and internal users alike.
