Enterprise CRM Implementation: What Would you Choose ?

CRM Implementation for the Enterprise: Who to bet on?

Most of our portfolio companies use Salesforce.com to manage their sales team and sales activities. Being in the expansion stage for the most part, they have a small but growing sales team and Salesforce.com’s on demand, scalable software appears to be the no-brainer choice. However, as we know, the most lucrative segment of the market is in large, G2000 companies and the likes, whose CRM implementation requires thousands of seats and very advanced functionalities. This is an area where competition is the greatest and most exciting.

While on-premise CRM still dominates this segment as a whole, Salesforce.com is really making a lot of headway for on demand CRM software, supplanting older implementation and competing head on against Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. On the other hand, these more established players are coming back at Salesforce.com by embracing the cloud computing model more wholeheartedly, most notably with Oracle’s acquisition and rebranding of Siebel’s on demand CRM, and SAP’s nascent On demand offering.

Given how late Oracle was to the on demand game and extensive roots in the installed software space, one has to be quite surprised with their growth and position relative to Salesforce.com. According to CRMSoftware Advice‘s most recent article, Oracle’s On Demand CRM is on par with Salesforce.com on Scalability, Usability and Architecture — typically the unique strengths that Salesforce.com has built upon from their beginnings.

Oracle only lags Salesforce.com on Social CRM, Field Service and Customer Service Management, but on the other hand, they leverage their deep expertise in at enterprise level in creating competitive advantage on industry specific implementation, analytics and customer data management. These are functionalities that become uniquely important with the scale of the implementation.

What matters more in the long run, then: business critical needs at large scale enterprises that requires better data management and analytics, or the innovation’s edge that gives rise to the Force.com network of on demand software applications and Chatter social CRM?

Both companies have unique competitive positions. Which one do you think will be successful eventually? Have your say, and see other’s opinions at the online survey at SoftwareAdvice.com.