Mary,
Sorry to take so long to reply. I have been away from this site for a while. There is a very good overview of what I(and the other players) call the Customer Interaction Systems(CIS) market in the form of a market research report that is produced by the Aberdeen Group. I believe that you should be able to find them with a search on their name. If not let me know and I'll get their number. The analyst covering this market is Hugh Bishop and he does an excellent job. As regards the Sales Force Automation(SFA) vendors, the answer is multi-faceted. The SFA market is less mature than the helpdesk, or customer support and service markets. However, it is projected by most analysts to both grow more rapidly and ultimately be a much larger market. Accordingly, this market presents a tremendous opportunity both for investors and software vendors.
There are some interesting dynamics going on in this market space. There are a couple of old line(read old technology) vendors who have been in this market for many years. However, they have not been able to fully develop this market's potential. Newer technology is making SFA more viable and is also making it tougher on these old line vendors. Sales Technologies was a former subsidiary of Dun & Bradstreet which had the largest share of the SFA market. In addition Brock Control Systems also had a large share of the market. Both of these vendors have had difficulty in the new competitive climate and, in fact, Dun & Bradstreet liquidated the entire Sales Technologies business and directed their customers to another vendor called Aurum.
In this environment, you have smaller SFA companies moving in to the void left by the older vendors. Examples of leaders in this category include Aurum, Siebel Systems, Abalon AB and Saratoga Systems. In addition, you have a set of companies which are putting together suites of CIS applications which includes Sales and Marketing modules. These suites of applications have some advantages in that they allow a client company to have an integrated solution out-of-the-box and provide for a consistent CIS IT infrastructure. These Suite vendors incude Software Artistry, Vantive, Scopus and Astea and Clarify. There will be a struggle for this market between the aforementioned players. The latter group have all gone public on the success of their products in other more mature CIS market segments.
The net of all of this from an investment perspective is to keep an eye on the battle to see how it unfolds. There may be an opportunity for Aurum or Siebel Systems to go public. As well, those suite vendors who successfully gain control of the SFA segment will stand to benefit immensely.
Good Luck,
Anthony Wooten |
