What seems to be happening, especially now that enterprises are well into their post-year 2000 planning and development processes, is that they are starting to look far more closely at what their applications actually do for them. This is then compared with what they want to achieve in terms of business management and development.
The market for new ERP installations may have flattened, but there is still much work to be done on integrating ERP applications into business process, and on weeding out aspects of generic ERP systems that are not relevant to individual firms.
The same pattern is predicted for CRM by Gartner's Thompson. Though currently firms are rushing to buy CRM systems, the real problem for many will come as they try to fully integrate CRM with the rest of their applications and processes.
Until this integration takes place, many firms will be working with systems that build very poor relationships with their customers. To improve the situation will re-quire some degree of modification and tailoring to make generic CRM applications match specific enterprise requirements. And Thompson predicts this will inevitably lead to a savage shakeout of generic CRM vendors, with the likely outcome being that only two or three will survive.
The ones that do survive will undoubtedly be those that componentise their generic offering sufficiently to allow the niche CRM vendors to use those components as the building blocks of their own vertical market solutions.
In the end, the long-term winners in CRM, ERP and other enterprise software sectors will be those companies that put higher value on understanding the users' requirements than on the technology.
And while many of these winners may be among the outsourcing service suppliers, it is likely that some of the most accomplished may come from the ranks of IT departments in the vertical markets they serve.
