Last year I was involved a few times with setting up or advising about hosted CRM 4.0. I meet some companies at the Convergence 2007 that were providing hosted CRM 4.0 solutions of course in combination with MS Exchange and SharePoint. I guess it was due to the credit crunch that last year in Copenhagen I didn’t see any hosted CRM m 4.0 providers or at least not as many as in the previous year.
Nevertheless you could witness some curious development in the market for hosted CRM 4.0. Of course there are new players, but also unexpected players like SAP companies, setting up their hosted CRM 4.0 businesses.
A quick google for some providers and their prices give a surprising result, especially in price levels. In general you have price per user and sometimes a setup fee. You can extend it with more space, extra functionalities like hosted MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, BlackBerry support etc.
A highlight of the companies I came across:
The price in Euro & U$ (rates may differ due to current exchange rate)
Update: I already received some comments on this post. The latest of Neil Benson, I would agree with his view on the current market. It would indeed be better to have some good and reliable companies providing hosted CRM. Maybe time for Microsoft to select the reliable ones for their product? Guess time will tell, for potential customers it would be beneficial to have some clues in which company to choose for hosted CRM.
Nevertheless you could witness some curious development in the market for hosted CRM 4.0. Of course there are new players, but also unexpected players like SAP companies, setting up their hosted CRM 4.0 businesses.
A quick google for some providers and their prices give a surprising result, especially in price levels. In general you have price per user and sometimes a setup fee. You can extend it with more space, extra functionalities like hosted MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, BlackBerry support etc.
A highlight of the companies I came across:
The price in Euro & U$ (rates may differ due to current exchange rate)
- www.agilewave.com (€31/$40)
- www.arxus.eu (€69/$90)
- www.bpost-live.be (€40/$52)
- www.crmontarget.com (€53/$69)
- www.hostedcrm.be (€67/$87)
- www.idenet.com (€29/$38)
You could see the price difference, in general they offer the same package although some offer more gigs of space.
Comparing it yourself!
Update: I already received some comments on this post. The latest of Neil Benson, I would agree with his view on the current market. It would indeed be better to have some good and reliable companies providing hosted CRM. Maybe time for Microsoft to select the reliable ones for their product? Guess time will tell, for potential customers it would be beneficial to have some clues in which company to choose for hosted CRM.
Comments
Microsoft now has a local hosted CRM provider in every country in Europe. There are over 125 providers globally.
In my opinion, this is about 120 too many. Each provider is making significant investments in infrastructure, staff, processes and sales and marketing to fill their platform with CRM users.
Some providers are Exchange specialists who really know their infrastructure stuff, but don't know anything about CRM and what's required to successfully deploy it. Others are CRM consultancies who do a great job of the implementation, but are new to hosting and infrastructure management. Some successful CRM hosting providers serve niche industries with a pre-configured CRM system, and there will be plenty of room for these kinds of industry specialists.
The result of having some many hosted CRM partners to choose from is significant over-capacity and under-utilisation which keeps prices up, especially when compared to our favourite common on-demand CRM competitor.
I think we'll see rapid consolidation in this sector over the next couple of years. Microsoft are already beginning to concentrate their investment in a few of the largest CRM hosting partners and, of course, their own Dynamics CRM Online platform (although this won't be available in Europe for anotehr couple of years).
Neil Benson, chief addict
Increase CRM (http://www.increasecrm.co.uk)
http://searchcrm.bitpipe.com/data/mp3Player.do?res_id=1235601183_700
Nice podcast.
Greetings,
Marcel
Neil