Beancounters at Gartner have added up some numbers and concluded that CRM is now the King of all Software having overtaken database management systems (DBMSs) as the most significant software sub-segment.
It thinks that CRM will continue to become more important thanks to GDPR, which will be enforced from 25 May.
CRM software revenues hit $39.5 billion in 2017, ahead of DBMS sales of $36.8 billion. The market is projected to grow a further 16 percent in 2018, making it not only the largest but also the fastest-growing software market.G
Gartner research director Julian Poulter said that the market’s major suite vendors are showing “stronger than average growth” as they successfully cross-sell additional modules to existing customers.
“Organisations are keen to avoid silos of information and to obtain a 360-degree view of the customer,” he said.
“The 360-degree view allows better application of artificial intelligence to make the users of the CRM system more effective.”
CRM budgets will rise further over the next three years in the wake of GDPR as poor CRM will lead to a privacy violation and a GDPR sanction. Application leaders need to enhance control over personal data usage throughout the data lifecycle and safeguard processed personal data so that it is not used beyond the context of predefined and documented use cases.
