Top 15 CRM Software Awards for Enterprise and Small & Medium Business Solutions Announced

The maturing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry is making several major shifts including an expansion of wireless capabilities and implementations increasingly coming in-house. ISM announces the CRM trends for 2005 along with its annual Top 15 Software Awards in Enterprise and Small & Medium Business (SMB) categories.

Tested at the ISM Software Lab at its Bethesda, Md. headquarters, ISM rates each package according to 211 selection criteria including 109 business functions, 49 technical features, 36 implementation capabilities and 17 user-support features.

"The winners are to be praised for obtaining the Top 15 honor given ISM's strenuous and comprehensive software selection process," said Goldenberg. "The Top 15 CRM Awards, which serve as the standard for CRM software, have expanded considerably since ISM began presenting the awards in 1990."

And the winners in alphabetical order are:

Note: Winners in both SMB and Enterprise categories are software solutions from Clear Technologies, Inc., OnContact Software Corporation and Siebel Systems, Inc.

ISM Top 15 CRM Enterprise Winners

• Amdocs ClarifyCRM v. 12 - Amdocs Limited
• C2 CRM v. 7.07 - Clear Technologies, Inc.
• Epiphany E6 v. 6.5 - Epiphany, Inc.
• Firstwave CRM 2004 - Firstwave Technologies, Inc.
• CMS v. 8.0 - OnContact Software Corporation
• Onyx Enterprise CRM 5.0 - Onyx Software
• ExSellence 4.8 - Optima Technologies, Inc.
• PeopleSoft CRM 8.9 - Oracle/PeopleSoft, Inc.
• Pivotal CRM Suite 5.1 - Pivotal Corporation
• mySAP CRM 4.0 - SAP AG
• Saratoga iAvenue v. 6.4 - Saratoga Systems, Inc.
• Siebel 7.7 - Siebel Systems, Inc.
• growBusiness Solutions v. 2.5 - Software Innovation
• SSA CRM - SSA Global
• Tibco Process RM v. 9.0 - Tibco

ISM Top 15 CRM SMB Winners (+)

• ACCPAC CRM v. 5.7 - ACCPAC International
• Ardexus MODE v. 4.5 - Ardexus, Inc.
• Powertrak v. 6.3 - Axonom, Inc.
• SalesLogix v. 6.2 - Best Software
• C2 CRM v. 7.07 - Clear Technologies, Inc.
• Goldmine v. 6.7 & HEAT v. 8.0 - FrontRange Solutions, Inc.
• iETSolutions Enterprise v. 9.5 - iETSolutions
• Salesplace 2005.3 - Interchange Solutions
• Maximizer Enterprise 8.0 - Maximizer Software, Inc.
• NetCRM v. 10 & NetSuite v. 10 - NetSuite, Inc.
• CMS 8.0 - OnContact Software Corportation
• Relavis v. 6.5 - Relavis Corporation
• Salesforce.com - Salesforce.com
• Salespage v. 4.6 - Salespage
• Siebel CRM OnDemand v. 6.0 - Siebel Systems, Inc.
• StayinFront Visual Elk v. 9.1 - StayinFront, Inc.
• X-Pack for marketing.manager 6 - update Software AG

(+) : Two additional companies met the SMB category criteria for a total of 17 winners.

Based on the software testing process and a survey conducted with the 29 winners, Goldenberg addresses two major issues facing vendors: implementations and wireless applications.

Of the SMB companies whose software won the Top 15 award, all declared that they were doing more implementations now than in 2004, with eight of the 17 handling at least 60 percent of customer implementations and only three vendors outsourcing implementations 70 percent or more. The picture was even more dramatic for the Enterprise CRM Top 15 vendors, with only one company under 70 percent for in-house implementations.

"In an effort to secure customer loyalty, vendors are placing increased emphasis on ensuring the successful implementation of each CRM initiative. This includes CRM software vendors taking more control over user adoption, ROI metrics and the people/process side of CRM," said Goldenberg.