WHY SAP IS THE DOMINANT ERP PROVIDER?

Customer Relationship Management software as a subset of ERP, with integrated services is now a requirement for any company north of $5 million in revenue per annum. One of your greatest challenges is wading through a growing list of vendors and their single marketing automation services mapped to your in-house technology, staffing and strategic business requirements. The market is healthy but consolidating, according to Gartner's latest reports, the CRM market grew 13.7 percent last year from $18 billion in 2012 to $20.4 billion in 2013.

Growth drivers continue to be the investment enterprise and SMB companies are making in all types of digital marketing and customer experience initiatives -- outbound activities necessitate downstream measurement and analysis. The vendor list of market leaders is fragmented, with SAP, SalesForce, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, all with double digit market share, except for IBM.

Competition is fierce, as major players fight for market share across global markets and try to build in more robust functionality with suites of products and services to serve midsize to large enterprise companies. SalesForce dominates the market; but, SAP remains the number two position; but is the leader in terms of revenue generation and in more narrow verticals: customer service and ecommerce.

The Cloud is Driving CRM Adoption

We are now in the age of the cloud with CRM, 41 percent of all CRM systems sold in 2013 were SaaS (cloud) based across all companies, regardless of size. The cloud is easier to deploy, provides legacy data integration, can be quickly implemented (that's a relative term of course) and will not strain your existing IT structure. 

Four Critical Functions any CRM Vendor Should Provide Your Business

Every business, regardless of size, struggles with understanding who is buying your products and services, or why not, and then digging into meaningful data.

• Lead management or sales funnel deep dive integration, whichever term you prefer, is critical: extracting a finite number of unqualified contacts and opportunities from multiple sources including web forms, email and direct marketing campaigns, social media, tradeshows and webinars.
• Onboard analytics, KPIs and Business Intelligence; the ability to transfer or move data between applications, encompassing source applications (web sites, referral systems) and execution applications like email used in closed loop marketing. You must be able to identify patterns in your aggregated data. 
• Again, lead flow analysis and nurturing via a sales funnel: append missing data that is pulled from third party sources and then store it in a database with matching information associated with a specific lead or customer.
• Integrated APIs and templates with third party applications with published API specifications and integration with all social platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) and mainstream marketing data from call/contact center, virtual and real world events (aggregated data).

What Makes SAP a Great Choice?

In the ancient days, the saying in business was you would never be fired for making the "safe" choice with IBM. SAP has usurped IBM in today's world; they are now the dominant player in CRM and ERP solutions, with a broad suite of applications. With locations in more than 130 countries, and just under 300K customers worldwide and a dominant position as the leader in enterprise applications and software, they are the market leader for good reason.

SAP Business ByDesigjn is an enterprise focused ERP and CRM system that facilitates end-to-end integration for critical business functions, including finance, HR, Supply Chain Management, Project Management, Compliance and Customer Relationship Management. And SAP offers no fewer than four business applications for SMB and SME companies: Business One and Business All-in-One are robust mature solutions that can be deployed on premise as an ERP system, while Business ByDesign and Sales on Demand represent SAP's foray into the cloud.

SAP has been aggressively making acquisitions to cement and grow its market share, including recent deals with Oracle and Microsoft to strengthen it's SaaS and Cloud Services. Like any market leader, SAP training and support is readily available with a large group of suppliers. Competition is again fierce in this market; but SAP has hung on to their dominant position with an aggressive "take no prisoners" business model and as earlier, aggressively acquiring other companies and cutting deals to offset competitive forces.

SAP HANA is Robust and Comprehensive

SAP's HANA is at the center of SAP's technology driven quest for competitive strategy and market share dominance. In layman's terms, it's a set of blazing fast database technologies, allowing an application that sit on top of it to run very fast. It can be deployed as a cloud solution or via the platform where your core SAP business suite resides. HANA is a robust, powerful technology that offsets any problems you may have with business processes and calculations caused by the "need for unquenchable speed" - huge amounts of data can be read and processed, with no impact whatsoever on calculations or processes. And, SAP HANA was designed as an in memory platform that can not only be accessed and utilized by IT but the entire company, enhancing business processes and enabling your company to conceptualize and utilize new business use cases. 

Your Choices are Infinite but SAP is the Market Leader for Good Reason

My focus in writing this post was to provide just a compressed outline of SAP's technology and position as the market leader. Deployment of any/all ERP and CRM applications or technology is challenging and takes methodical planning. It's not an easy process and requires dedicated personnel to manage and optimize. But, CRM technology, regardless of the vendor you choose, is an investment in "command and control" technology that will deliver long term ROI if deployed properly and integrated with your business rules.

SAP is managed by a team of very talented executives, is shifting it's focus to the cloud to leverage growth in the SaaS market, financially sound and technically sophisticated and has a customer installed based of over 300K blue chip companies. They are an innovative aggressive company, with significant resources and support capabilities and a market leader for good reason!
Source: Why SAP Is the Dominant ERP Provider?