Stefan Mileschin

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software may be the most boring software category in the universe but there’s money in them thar lines of code.

Revenues for CRM software amounted to £23.2 billion in 2014 and that’s a rise of 13.3 percent compared to 2013.

A Gartner report said the biggest vendors used acquisitions to increase their market share. Joanne Correia, a senior analyst at the market research company said: “We saw market consolidation continue, and price wars started quickly as large vendors fought to keep their installed base from moving to other vendors and to stop the descent of their maintenance revenue.”

Salesforce led the CRM pack last year, with 16.3 percent market share, while SAP had 12.8 percent of the market, followed by Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. The “others” had 50.4 percent market share, suggesting there’s plenty of room for more mergers and acquisitions. Microsoft was rumoured to be interested in buying Salesforce just a little while ago, but denied it was interested.

Correia said that demand for software as a service (SaaS) continued and represented 47 percent of revenues last year. That’s what kept Salesforce at number one.

She said that over 23 percent of CRM spend last year was in the communications, media and IT service sectors.

http://www.techeye.net/business/crm-software-on-the-up