The Blog

Rank

My world is buzzing with reporters’ calls seeking comment and colleagues at the Enterprise Irregulars offering up opinions.  Here are a few things to think about that I have ruminated on.

1. For some companies figuring out CRM revenue is easy.  Just ask Salesforce about their revenue or read their SEC documents and Voila!  But it’s not so easy to tease apart CRM from other revenue if a multi-product vendor like SAP or Oracle decides that apples is apples and doesn’t split out the different revenue streams — effectively asking the analysts, “How do you like them apples?”
2. I can understand a financial analyst firm doing this kind of work but less so a technology or industry analyst firm.  Sure, these reports make for fun reading but they are backward looking.  Financial guys look backward all the time.  Heck, I know some that haven’t seen the recession yet.  But my peers ought to be looking forward.  Imagine if ten years ago we were all saying SaaS and Cloud are the future instead of:  On-prem forever!  But I digress.
3. When you don’t have hard numbers to deal with, and I strongly suspect that some of these vendors undoubtedly did not give the analysts dollars and cents results, you start having to triangulate.  The vendor might say that their revenues were in the x to y range and a competitor or two might say they’re in the low end of the range or whatever.  The result is that the analysts have to read tealeaves and do some math that is based on assumptions.  When that happens, all bets ought to be off.  Averaging everyone’s estimates just gives an error prone result if you can call it that.
4. Ditto for the size of the whole market.  About ten years ago I saw some work that looked like it took a long time to compile that said the CRM market had an absolute size of about $46 billion.  We left that number in the dust a while ago and we still forecast $20+ billion in products and services per year and growing.  Go figure, if you can.
5. Then there is the matter of how you measure.  Fiscal years differ, measurements differ — Seats? Dollars? Currency Conversions? Canasta? — the analysts have to rationalize it all so that we’re all talking apples.  That’s hard to do.

A few years ago SAP was battling Siebel for the #1 ranking and according to financial analyst reports at the time, they were booking any revenue that was not nailed down as CRM.  I still have the reports.  I think SAP won the derby that year but the next year the analysts started counting the shelfware in major IT departments and guess what they found?  Only about half of SAP CRM had been installed or was likely to be while Siebel, Oracle and some others consistently had about 25% shelfware.

Market dominance became important when Geoffrey Moore published Crossing the Chasm because his data showed that most markets consolidate into a three horse race with numero uno taking most of the business, due hanging on to keep uno honest and tre looking for a buyer.  But each of the CRM vendors in the top five is a complex, multi-product company.  Each sells CRM for its own reasons and one of them is surely to offer a complete product line that keeps competitors at arms length.  The number one spot is still coveted for bragging rights but trust me, if the ranking disappeared tomorrow, very few CIOs would have trouble rounding up the usual suspects for an RFP.

So to net it out, take this all with a pound of salt.  It’s a beauty contest at best and in my humble opinion not a representation of the best work that analysts — either of financial or industry variety — can do.