On-demand upstarts beating Siebel for attention...and that's about it

Today I came across Forrester’s latest CRM vendor evaluation:

• Siebel continues to lead the pack. Siebel continues to offer the most comprehensive solution-set for enterprise-class organizations, with the largest array of front-office solutions tailored to specific industry challenges and opportunities.
• SAP has momentum and is gaining ground. SAP, through mySAP CRM, has emerged with increasing momentum. The company is investing heavily to fill out its product suite and offers buyers end-to-end business process solutions.
• Oracle is growing to overtake the leader. Oracle's recent acquisition of PeopleSoft gives the combined entity full coverage of all major CRM functionalities and a larger, more industry-balanced customer base on which to build.
• Amdocs is a good choice in special circumstances. Amdocs offers a flexible application with deep customer service functionality, scalability, and profound knowledge of the communications services providers and high-tech industries. The company offers an end-to-end solution by integrating customer-facing relationship management with the important customer billing process.

These findings looked familiar to me; Siebel is usually rated high in analyst reports. But I thought I'd pull together recent metrics from various sources to "validate" Siebel’s position. The table below shows information gathered from our BT Trax data, IDC's (client reg. req.) Worldwide CRM Applications 2004 Vendor Shares, Gartner's (client reg. req.) Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service and Support Applications, 2005, and a CRM ROI scorecard from Nucleus Research.

The BT Trax "preference" column shows how many times the average users download CRM resources (white papers, case studies, Webcasts, etc.) from our IT directory since the beginning of 2005. Siebel comes up at twice the norm, well ahead of most competitors, but still nowhere near the leader, RightNow, whose resources are getting 10 times more attention than the average. Also noteworthy is Salesforce.com, who too has significant traction in the IT directory with 3.5 times above the average popularity. These findings reveal that IT pros are seriously weighing in on the hosted/on-demand CRM models.

But where Siebel comes up short in attention it gains elsewhere. As seen earlier, it leads the pack according to Forrester; has the biggest slice of revenue market share; is the only "leader" in Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant; and prevails in Nucleus Research's ROI scorecard in the Enterprise CRM category with a score of 4.2/5.0.  

Siebel, which was late to the on-demand game, should keep a weary eye on the competition which appears to be telling a better marketing story.