Few years ago I participated in a strategic CRM consulting. The customer was using Siebel and SAP ERP . He considered other alternatives for CRM. My role in the consulting team was to analyze the CRM market and trends. CRM as a SaaS or on Demand was one of the major trends I mentioned. I wrote on SalesForce.com transforming the CRM market. I wrote on Seibel on Demand as well as on other SaaS style CRM solutions. Sap was an exception. It was the only vendor with no On Demand CRM strategy or solution. According to SAP, CRM should be integrated with ERP components and database, therefore it is not possible to properly implement CRM as a Service, together with Data Center based ERP. I explained to the client, that sooner or later we will find SaaS CRM solutions by SAP. However, about two days before we completed our paper Oracle announced Siebel acquisition. The most important questions were: Is the acquisition is due to Installed Base or product features? ...
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