Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is catching on big time in India and many opportunists are cashing in on this huge market. In Gartner's view, the Indian CRM market size is about 15% of the overall Asia Pacific (APAC) market, the second largest in the region, after Australia. By2014, CRM in India is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16% to 19%. Yanna Dharmasthira, Research Director at Gartner said in 2009, "In the next five years, India is projected to have the second highest CAGR after China as far as CRM is concerned." Gartner revised the growth rate of the Indian CRM market, specifically for the year 2010 in which it was expected to reach $100 million.
CRM systems developed in India like Impel CRM, SageCRM, Zoho, CRM24x7.com and Smiles becoming quite popular, however they have yet to demonstrate significant market share in India where SalesForce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Oracle CRM are dominating in the Enterprise space. Though, Zoho is catching up quite fast with their user friendly and simple interface.
Open source software solutions like SugarCRM and vtiger have also found some users in India, however, as with open source CRM software on a global basis, these products are largely accepted by the small businesses and are not very popular as they need a lot of maintenance / customizations.
Several enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suppliers such as Ramco, Focus Infosoft and Wings ERP were found to be domestic market share leaders in the back office space and offer integrated customer relationship management solutions along with their ERP suites.
Some other vendors and apps worth mentioning are marketing based apps that provide the intelligent information to the CRM applications. Eloqua (that Oracle has acquired) is a leader in the digital marketing and automation. Another big vendor in the marketing automation space is Marketo that acquired Crowd Factory last year and is playing in the space of digital marketing & automation. A few others worth mentioning in the email marketing domain are ExactTarget, Emailvision and Silverpop. Many of these focus on small to medium sized buyers, including Constant Contact,VerticalResponse and the rapidly growing MailChimp. There's much innovation at the SMB level including Nimble and InfusionSoft, which recently garnered substantial venture backing.
So folks, CRM is coming of age, even in India where more and more small & mid size businesses are following Mahatma Gandhi's eternal rule - Customer is God!
