August 07, 2018

August 7, 2018 | Bob Ludlam | Vice President of Sales – Americas

Growth in the CRM market space has skyrocketed and is forecasted to continue unrivaled growth for the foreseeable future. This constant growth sees companies like SAP and Oracle losing market share to best-in-breeds like Salesforce. To combat Salesforce’s rising dominance, SAP has recently announced a goal to recapture share with the launch of C/4HANA. Is SAP too late to recapture CRM market share?

CRM Market Growth and Projections

Based on market research provided by Gartner, the CRM market is the fastest growing segment of the enterprise and infrastructure software spaces and will remain so through at least 2022. As a business, it is valuable to know who the leaders are in the market today and who is projected to gain market share in the next 5-7 years.

More and more enterprises are looking outside the mega-vendors like SAP and Oracle to find best in breed cloud solutions that integrate back into their core ERP systems. With new technologies and integration tools, there is no reason to be tied to one vendor to run all aspects of your business.

As the CRM market continues to grow faster than any other ERP segment positioned within the SAP or Oracle ecospheres, more players are entering the game. SAP recognizes the considerable market potential, as evidenced by their recent objective to gain a leadership role in CRM applications and to knock off Salesforce. Per Gartner, “CRM application software, at more than $40.7 billion in sales in 2017, has grown to become the largest software segment, overtaking data management software. The worldwide enterprise application software market grew 13.4% in U.S. dollars in 2017, up from 8.9% in 2016. This market growth directly answers any doubt regarding why SAP is investing heavily in the CRM market – highly lucrative opportunities exist.”

The pressure is on SAP to catch up. Gartner analyst Ed Thompson wrote, “The CRM market is expected to reach more than $75bn by the end of 2022, compared with $44bn for ERP, meaning that SAP has to do well in CRM with their latest all in strategy. At 18.8% market share, Salesforce has more than twice SAP’s share (8.5%) and is growing faster than the market rate.”

SAP’s CRM Playbook – All In on C/4HANA

SAP describes the driving force behind C/4HANA as moving from a 360-degree view of sales automation, where most companies focus, to a 360-degree view of the actual customer. Components of C/4HANA fortify SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and SAP Commerce Cloud.

Currently, SAP has declared 8,300 customers on S/4HANA, which is less than 2% of their customer base and is also far behind Salesforce’s overall cloud revenues recently reported at $3 Billion. Since C/4HANA sits on the SAP Cloud Platform requiring most customers to perform a major ERP upgrade or migration to cloud services in order to implement C/4HANA, SAP may experience difficulties in taking back the leadership role in CRM.

SAP is on the right track by delivering a Customer Experience (CX) Solution that brings together customer data, machine learning, and full-service offerings across services, marketing, and commerce. However, they appear to be a little late to the game. Can customers wait until C/4HANA is ready to implement a cloud-based CRM solution?

How Spinnaker Support Can Help with Your CRM Solution

Although many SAP customers want to remain aligned with SAP’s longer-term product vision and roadmap, they find themselves misaligned now. Customers want to sustain their current on-premise business application footprint and save money until they are ready to adopt SAP next-generation solutions.

Increasingly, more enterprises that run SAP are adopting Spinnaker Support for support of existing CRM systems. The shift to third-party support buy time to assess their future CRM options and allows them to redirect support fee savings towards their CRM of choice.

If C/4HANA is the right CRM for your organization, Spinnaker Support can take care of your existing SAP landscape with better service at less than half the cost. We can investigate tools to innovate around your core systems and prepare your infrastructure for a move to S/4HANA and C/4HANA in the future.

Our SAP customers trust us to provide unbiased consultation to help them smoothly navigate from where they are today to where they should be tomorrow. Our incremental services, including managed services and consulting, deliver unprecedented value to keep SAP applications secure, interoperable, and valuable.

Conclusion

Is it too late for SAP to win back market share in the CRM space? While it’s hard to tell if C/4HANA will make SAP a market leader in the CRM space, one thing is for sure: as the market expands, the clear winner is the customer.

Spinnaker Support buys you time to select your next CRM solution wisely, whether offered by a mega-vendor or new niche player. We can count on the fierce competitive dynamics of SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and Microsoft to keep it exciting and to drive much higher levels of business return-on-investment. Learn more about how Spinnaker Support can help set your company up for CRM success. After all, support should be supportive.