Figures from Gartner show the worldwide customer relationship management (CRM) market grew 12.3 per cent in 2015 to $26.3 billion.
The top five vendors accounted for more than 45 per cent of the total market, with little change in ranking from 2014. Salesforce is still leading the way with 19.7 per cent, followed by SAP with 10.2 per cent, and Oracle with 7.8 per cent. A new entrant to the top five in 2015 was Adobe, which displaced IBM with its focus on CRM for marketing agencies and the chief marketing officer.
Other vendors still constitute 54.5 per cent of the total market, or $14.3 billion in revenues.
“The merger and acquisition activity that began flowing through the market in 2009 continued in 2015, with more than 30 notable acquisitions,” said Julian Poulter, research director at Gartner. “This has resulted in increased competition at the top end of the CRM market, with the continued focus of global vendors’ sales forces driving good growth worldwide in all CRM subsegments but only for cloud or software as a service (SaaS) applications.
“CRM growth is driven by cloud service revenue, which, in the application space, uses SaaS as the major delivery model,” said Poulter. “SaaS revenue grew 27 per cent year over year, which is more than double overall CRM market growth in 2015. On-premises new license revenue declined 1 per cent for the same period.”
At the regional level, emerging Asia-Pacific was the fastest-growing, with growth of 21.9 per cent in 2014, followed by greater China with 18.4 per cent growth. Middle East and North Africa, and mature Asia-Pacific posted double-digit growth of 10.7 and 10.2 per cent respectively. The North American market continued to generate the bulk of revenue at 55.7 per cent.
