SAP to Target SMBs With its CRM Products
Given that the enterprise market is pretty saturated and renewing licenses is pretty much only way to make money off the big companies; it is not surprising that software vendors are looking to target the mid-market segment.The growth of SaaS has been a major factor in driving the attention of companies like SAP and Oracle towards SMBs.
SAP started offering MySAP CRM as a hosted service around two years ago. The company fell behind Salesforce.com and many other pure SaaS players, partly because of the delay in bringing out Business ByDesign. Yet, SAP has kept up its efforts in the SaaS CRM arena and in the recently concluded SAPPHIRE user conference, it announced new CRM functionality in its Business All-in-One solution for medium-sized companies.
With SMBs, cost is a huge issue. A lot of free CRM and ERP services can be had for free now, which I think will make a huge impact on the SMB market… such as Zoho or http://www.octopusvcity.com, which offers free CRM, free teleconferencing, plus an online business community.