Conclusion
For small businesses looking to implement CRM, the various on-demand hosting solutions offered by the big enterprise players have changed the picture completely.
Traditionally, a company with half a dozen employees would not have considered vendors like Oracle, but now Oracle is serving customers in that space. So for small business there are plenty of compelling options to choose from, and none of them need to be on-premise. Companies should look to their long-term anticipated needs and see which vendor offers the best functionality in their industry, but in terms of rapid deployment and ease of set-up, SugarCRM, Salesforce CRM and Dynamics CRM all offer strong solutions.
Medium-sized businesses looking to deploy CRM will possibly be limited by any existing on-premise business solutions. Integration and leveraging off uniform platforms offer power and flexibility, and thus it's harder to make a business case to introduce a new vendor into the mix. For Microsoft-dominated environments, Dynamics CRM should be the first consideration, but both Oracle and SAP also offer rapid on-demand deployment with the potential to future moves towards SaaS and on-premise, and both vendors' data integration tools are excellent.
For large national and global enterprises, it's hard to look past Oracle's CRM product suite. Of course, all major players in this space offer custom vertical solutions, data analytics and business intelligence, but Oracle's innovation in sales force empowerment through Social CRM is very compelling and marks the company as a stand-out in this space.
What customer relationship management suite do you prefer? One of the big guns or a smaller player and why? Post your comments below in the talkback or drop us a line.
7 pages of ad impressions for a conclusion of "well, it depends..."