Earlier when organizations' large IT projects concentrated on Main Frames, ERP, MRP and SCM systems, a new concept of "Front Office applications" changed focus to Customers resulting in the emergence of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications.

CRM helped Organizations in improving efficiency and better services to Customers. CRM was the mantra for surviving in the competitive market by focusing on Customer needs. To help achieve this, there were many CRM solutions that came out in the Market. Such solutions included generic CRM solutions focused on sales and services to Industry specific solutions that embedded the best practices for those industries. Such solutions helped Software developers and Software vendors in generating large revenues in terms of Sales and Implementation of such applications.

Now most of the large Organizations have opted, implemented and more or less stabilized one or another application with its core and customized CRM functionality. This article explores further opportunities that are available in CRM Market. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI): Once a CRM solution is implemented, The Organization needs to focus on integrating it with other applications. There are diverse applications and technologies used in an Organization that need to interact with each other. Integrating such applications will help in sharing business critical data and help improve in better business efficiency by reducing the time that is required to spend on gathering and sharing such information. This brings out the opportunity of Application to Application (A2A) and Business to Business (B2B) integration using EAI strategies like Point to Point, Hub and Spoke and Distributed Messaging.

Upgrade: There are many large Organizations who have heavily customized CRM solutions which they have continued using for years. There are new / latest versions of such applications available. As of now there are many CRM solution providers who are supporting old versions of their application, but how long is a Question. Once those Organizations decide to upgrade or move to later / latest versions of the application, this will open up new market.

Small and Medium Enterprise (SME): Although CRM solutions have been implemented by most of the large Organizations, SME segment is still vastly open and lot of potential to be capitalized.

Hosted Solutions: There are many small Organizations who neither have capacity nor infrastructure to buy and implement CRM solution. Such small Organizations will prefer to opt for hosted solutions and pay based on the usage.

Redesign the wheel instead of Reinventing it - New Technology Architecture Changes like Service Oriented Architecture is requiring redesigning of the CRM solution architecture. This has opened up new market for Software Vendors and System Integrators. 

Sanjay Kumar
Expert Author
Published: 2005-11-04 

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