CRM shakeout begins as Oracle bags Siebel

This story is creating a lot of speculation. IMHO, the corporate love affair with CRM was over years ago, it just took Siebel a few years to wither. Now, the door is open to enterprising developers who can come up with 'over the wire' alternatives, especially for SMBs.

Salesforce.com is the player to watch though there are others. Salesforce recently got a boost from Spanning Partners, delivering lead info to Blackberry devices over RSS - cool. That's just the start.

I can see RSS delivering all manner of benefits to wire enabled apps, especially in the intelligence arena. How about aggregating data from RSS to provide intelligence to sales and service managers for instance? Massive cost savings all the way around and faster repsonse times.

Dennis and David, Have I mis-understood? By stand alone soltuion I assume that you mean a system that is separate from your ERP/financials etc, but where the data is shared between the two???

D'oh.

After re-reading this (and checking with David) I realised my error.

I agree, CRM HAS to use the same data as ERP, otherwise both systems have the potential of failing.

I don't think that CRM has died as a stand alone solution, it is simply more important than ever to ensure that you have the right application.

It's a case of so many different modules and functionality available, you need to be able to quickly and easily adapt the product to suit your needs - this is the main reason that on-demand suites like Salesforce, Netsuite and RightNow will create dominance.

When you consider all of the elements that CRM covers - Customer insight, customer experience, customer quality, marketing automation, sales automation, supply automation, marketing choice (the list goes on), the importance of a solution that integrates with your existing system and is flexible becomes the most important factor.

Personally I think that this will not kill CRM, it will actually make the market more exciting and dynamic. The need to get your CRM right will become more important than ever.

Correspondents are quite right to question the future of stand alone CRM. It should never have been given the free rein it was. In reality CRM was never about customers, relationship or managing those relationships except in one critical area - sales. CRM has not been about customers period. It is precisely because customers aer out of the loop in CRM applications that it has failed. The classic case of the Emperor's new clothes.

Surely, the logical conclusion to be drawn is that a CRM solution that is stand-alone just doesn't make any sense.