Salesforce.com Was The Top CRM Software Peddler In 2012

May 13, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Call it a sign of the times. According to the latest rankings available from IT market researcher Gartner, online and SaaSy software supplier Salesforce.com has blown by SAP to become the top supplier of customer relationship software in the world.

The rankings from Gartner are based financial figures for the full 2012 year, and have Salesforce.com raking in $2.53 billion for its online, subscription-based CRM wares. That is an increase of 26 percent over the revenues that the company generated in 2011. Salesforce.com was by no means the only fast-growing CRM software supplier, so don’t get the wrong idea. Microsoft, which ranked third by sales last year, had an identical 26 percent jump in 2011, to $1.14 billion, and IBM, which ranked fifth, had an impressive 39.4 percent jump in CRM software sales, to $649.1 million, thanks in large part to acquisitions over the past year. Other vendors outside of the top five, which includes SAP and Oracle at number two and three, comprised a little more than half of total CRM sales worldwide last year, which added up to $9.44 billion and which was up by 10.7 percent. The total market came to $18.1 billion and rose 12.5 percent year-on-year.

SAP, which has been obsessed about its HANA in-memory database technology, which did not do any huge CRM acquisitions last year, and which had to fight currency headwinds as the euro weakened, basically flat-lined with CRM software sales up only one-tenth of a point to $2.33 billion. Oracle, at number three, grew slower than the market at large, at only 7.8 percent, to just over $2 billion.

“Competition among CRM software vendors really heated up in 2012, as major players continued to vie for broader market penetration internationally and more widespread adoption within midsize to large enterprises,” explained Joanne Correia, vice president at Gartner, in a statement accompanying the stats. “Market growth in 2012 was three times the average for all enterprise software, highlighting how CRM is at the eye of the Nexus of Forces storm.”

That sounds so dramatic when she says it like that. . . .

The interesting statistic is that cloudy CRM software running on someone else’s cloud accounted for almost 40 percent of total CRM software last year. That is a lot higher SaaS penetration than many had been expecting.