The Gartner Magic Quadrant 2008 SFA Is "Interesting" VERY Interesting

I can't say that I've ever been completely convinced of the ultimate value of any analyst firms' geometric ranking systems, such as Gartner's Magic Quadrants or of Forrester's Waves or any of the lesser prominent hexagons or sine functions except as an interesting indicator as to what Gartner, Forrester or the owner of the particular polygonal 8-ball is thinking about companies in the space that my business life happens to inhabit. That said, I admire the same analyst firms because they do a lot of work to conclude what they conclude and they have highly evolved methodologies that they apply fairly. Though I've been on the other side of the equation and seen what companies do to qualify and lipstick on a pig seems to be an appropriate cliché for the occasion. Pigs are really smart about how they do things, though.

Barney Beal, a top notch CRM writer/editior at SearchCRM did an article on the Gartner 2008 SFA Magic Quadrant and there were some surprising and, to me, sad in the nostaglic sense, findings. Sad, in that PeopleSoft, long one of my favorite companies, as you know scarfed up by Oracle a coupla years ago, fell off the Magic Quadrant into orthogonal oblivion because, as Gartner puts it, "(PeopleSoft CRM) was unable to independently validate 15 new named customers that are actively deploying opportunity management functionality in the last 12 months." Also dropped was Oracle E-Business Suite. Not surprising, since Oracle is moving rapidly to consolidate its current offerings around Siebel and to focus on its Sales 2.0 capabilities both in their on demand and on premise versions. In the long term, of course, we'll see Oracle Fusion fully implemented (latest scuttlebut says 2009 sometime), combining all of them around a service oriented architecture and a common set of standards and practices with combined best-of-features-and-functions - all with a 2.0 envelope - right around the time everyone will be talking about Web 3.0 or 4.0 - oh, wait, they're already doing that. Needless to say, I'm sure that selling PeopleSoft and the "weaker-than-Siebel-or-PeopleSoft-by-a-long-shot" Oracle E-Business suite is not top of mind for any salesperson at Oracle - and shouldn't be. But, its sad to see PeopleSoft CRM, daughter of PeopleSoft CRM and Vantive go by the boards. It was always a really solid, functionally well articulated, if not particularly sexy product, and served its clientele well. And, of course, came from what was, in my mind, the paradigm, the standard for a high tech vendor company when it came to treating employees and customers the way they should be treated. That would be PeopleSoft in case you didn't figure out that out in a "doh" moment.

That sad goodbye stated, I find that there are some really interesting choices with the Gartner SFA, good and bad, especially when up against the Greenberg MMS (Magical Moebius Strip). Here's my thinking, briefly, in a convenient format (for me. It still hurts to write much at all so I have no choice but to keep this brief) :

1. The inclusion of ACT! and Goldmine in an SFA or CRM assessment is a real stretch. Much as ACT! is a good product (Goldmine still isn't in my book. Though that isn't the subject of this entry so I won't detail it now. Ask me and I'll answer when I can write a bit better) it lacks process flows, a sophisticated rules engine, or the ability to use integrated sales processes or to share at the level of true team selling or a relational database or the scalability of a true SFA product, ad infinitum. ACT! and Goldmine are contact management tools. Maximizer which I used to include in that category, I'm glad to say, is, since the release of version 10, is now an honest-to-god CRM application for small and medium businesses and a good one. But PLEASE stop muddling the waters by including ACT! and Goldmine in something as well read as the Magic Quadrant.
2. Glad to see that Landslide made the cut for the first time. While as always, I'm not a big fan of their (or any company's harping on separating themselves from SFA and CRM, they have a smart product that is geared toward small and medium businesses that incorporates multiple different selling methods and styles of selling and combines the software with the personal consultations with their staff. While they aren't the first to do this (Salesnet used to provide a business analyst who would look at how you sold in an ISO 9000 sort of way and then tailor the application/services to your sales approach. They wouldn't judge, just deconstruct), they do it and that is pretty much unique as an integrated part of the total offering. They also are looking at sales engagement with the customer, not just sales data accumulation which a fair amount of SFA applications focus on. In other words, in the jargon of the era - they are interaction focused, not transaction focused.
3. I agree that salesforce.com and Oracle/Siebel are the leaders in this quadrant at the this time. I would also put SAP CRM 2007 in the challengers role with an expectation that with next round and some more time to do what they are doing, SAP would easily move into the leaders role in SFA. For them, that's an incredible leap and well deserved because two years ago, I was hard pressed to even find their CRM application, much less put it anywhere. But they've made this leap into Challengers since last November with their massively overhauled SAP CRM 2007 release which I've covered in multiple blog entries and with their primo SAP CRM 2007 mobile SFA for the Blackberry, released at Sapphire this year. But it;s hard to dispute the long established Siebel and salesforce.com offerings as the leaders at this point. Siebel, despite its horror show of a company (except during the Mike Lawry era), always had a top flight sales product - one which led the pack for years as an independent offering. Their purchase of Upshot to add an on demand offering to their portfolio was one of the smartest moves they ever made and they've continually improved on the product until its reached a not-quite but nearly world class level at this point. But SAP is charging hard and I expect to see them in the leadership role next time around. Its just a matter of time.
4. Noticeably, the lack of sales configuration and incentive compensation features seems to have been a significant part of the reason that companies like SugarCRM and NetSuite were relegated to niche player roles. I'm mot sure what to make of that since I'm not aware of incentive compensation being or sales configuration baked into too many of the SFA applications as such including some of the challengers like Microsoft Dynamics CRM. So I'm going to have to assume there are were several other factors that mattered significantly to include companies like this in the Niche category. NetSuite's SFA features are strong in the traditional sense so I can't imagine that this would be the reason. I'm going to ask Gartner at their summit when I'm there in early September. I'd highly recommend you go and if you're going to be there, let me know at paul-greenberg3@comcast.net or Twitter or comment here and we can hook up. I'm not speaking there for the first time in 3 years but I am hosting a roundtable on social media in the pre-summit days (I think September 7).

That said, Gartner is right about the major aspects - Oracle/Siebel and salesforce.com do deserve the leaders role and SAP CRM 2007 is on the way there. Is Microsoft Dynamics CRM or SalesLogix interested in the leadership quadrant? I'm sure they are but they currently aim at a different marketplace than the other three. Microsoft and Sage offerings are not for the enterprise at this time - and likely never to really be there - though I have to assume that Microsoft still has enterprise aspirations. Saleslogix is small and midmarket and desires no other place. So how do you actually compare it?

All in all, the Magic Quadrant is always worth looking at and, because its Gartner, the customers will be reviewing it when it comes to selection - which is a helluva lot more important than me or anyone else looking at it - no matter how cogent our analyses might be. The MQ is a guideline worth investing some time into - if not to see how companies compare re: Gartner's methodology, then for the sheer baseball-stats reasons - we love to rank stuff.

For me, this is a short look at something I want to pass on some preliminary thinking. Over the coming months, I'm going to be demoing many on the list and several not there (e.g. Entellium who fell off the list) so I can decide on how to or whether to include them in the book and to give you a feature-function assessment of how they are going to fit the new criteria that we're developing at the CRM 2.0 wiki and elsewhere for CRM 2.0 technology evaluations. Engagement models and and their feature/function/architecture/platform mixes are different than the "classic" CRM feature/function models. Watch here and the book for the new criteria.

I'm tired. Time to call it an entry and wrap it up.

Technorati : CRM, CRM 2.0, Gartner Magic Quadrant, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, SFA, SalesLogix, salesforce.com

Comments

[Jesus Hoyos]

It is sad to see PS CRM to be out of the magic quadrant... I loved the product and company as well. I participated in many PS CRM implementations. I also surprise that ACT! & Goldmine are in the quadrant. As you mentioned they are contact management tools and ideal for small business, and sometime small businesses are using SugarCRM, ZohoCRM and Salesforce.com.