CRM retains golden child status as growth tops 15 per cent

CRM 'remains largest and fastest-growing' enterprise app category in 2018, according to Gartner

Customer experience and relationship management (CRM) software continues to outshine all other enterprise application software categories, growing by over 15 per cent in 2018, according to Gartner.

Global spending on CRM software rose by 15.6 per cent to hit $48.2bn last year, making it both the largest and fastest-growing enterprise application software category, according to the market watcher.

Total enterprise application software revenue hit $19.6bn, a 12.5 per cent hike, meaning CRM accounted for more than one in four dollars spent in the space last year.

Microsoft is a new name in the top five CRM vendors after it grew revenues in this space from $1.1bn to $1.3bn, chomping out 2.7 per cent marketshare.

Salesforce remains the runaway CRM leader with $9.4bn revenues and marketshare of 19.5 per cent, ahead of SAP, Oracle and Adobe.

Driven by agility, flexibility and the requirement for remote and mobile users, SaaS' share of the CRM market would pogo from 73 to 75 per cent of the market this year, Gartner predicted.

"Cloud growth has dropped slightly in 2018 but remains strong at 20 per cent and significantly above the overall growth rate of 15.6 per cent for CRM," said Julian Poulter, senior director analyst at Gartner.

"As an early mover to the cloud, CRM software is probably seeing a gradual reduction in cloud growth rates due to high adoption."