Nov. 10, 2006

Acquired by Oracle last year, CRM (customer relationship management) provider Siebel has the revenue lead in the financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, retail and utilities industries, according to a new study performed by IDC.

At the same time, communications and media was dominated by CRM application vendor Amdocs. Overall, Reynolds and Reynolds had the lead in the automotive sector, and Salesforce.com was the hosted CRM specialist that dominated other industries.

What's noteworthy is, despite the attention garnered by SAP's claim to have overtaken Siebel in CRM revenue since 2004, SAP was not a leader in any of the vertical categories despite having a massive ERP presence in those vertical markets.

If one then considers the fact that Oracle has separate CRM products (including popular products inherited from its acquisition of PeopleSoft, PeopleSoft's acquisition of J.D. Edwards, and J.D. Edwards' acquisition of YouCentric), Oracle's CRM share is even bigger than it first appears.

In the long run, it will be interesting to analyze if SAP contests the IDC numbers in any way...

IDC isn't the only research company that ranks Oracle at the head of the CRM class revenue-wise. Gartner even estimated that, after the Siebel deal, Oracle would move about 3.5 percentage points ahead of SAP CRM in overall market share.

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