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To: Mike Buckley who wrote (52038)	7/12/2002 5:59:47 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

There may be no company that dominates it. This is my bet. From what I have seen ... at least for the mid-term ... mid-market companies have specific problem areas which they want to address and they are very price sensitive, so whatever product provides a best fit for the pain points and delivers at an acceptable price gets the sale. This makes it difficult for a company with a more comprehensive offering, like Siebel, to dominate since their biggest advantage is in the breadth of what they can do, i.e., open-ended horizontal and vertical growth, but that mostly doesn't matter to mid-market companies. I recently consulted with a small company that ended up picking Siebel, but it was clear that even Siebel thought it was unusual that such a small company had a big enough vision to make the breadth of offering compelling. I will be very surprised if one of the leading CRM companies today will move so successfully from the top-tier market into the mid-tier market that it ends up dominating it. In the mid term I would agree with you, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of gradual attrition and absorption of the smaller players moving gradually to a dominant position of one company, particularly if expectations about what CRM should do for them gradually matures. I also think it unlikely that any mid-market product will move up to the enterprise.