CRM giants deny 'doing a Salesforce.com'

Two of the largest names in customer relationship management (CRM) have stated their commitment to delivering applications on-demand. However, they claim it is a natural evolution which would have occurred with or without the likes of Salesforce.com.

Senior execs from SAP and Siebel, speaking at the Gartner CRM Summit in London, denied their newfound enthusiasm is a reaction to the growing success of NetSuite, RightNow and Salesforce.com, who have all been championing the on-demand model since 1998.

They also denied it is a case of playing catch-up, or exploiting the online service delivery model's immediacy to get a foot in the door for selling their traditional on-premise products.

But despite the denials and the fact 'the school of 98' was conspicuous by its absence from a session entitled 'The Many Roads to On Demand CRM' - comprising the event's two premium sponsors - the spectre of the upstart start-ups cast a shadow over most of the discussion.

Julian Johnson, VP CRM solutions EMEA at SAP, said his company's month-old on-demand product is a reaction to customer need, not rivals' innovation, and he said it would have been recognised organically.

He said: "We built this product so our customers could have an on-ramp to enterprise CRM. We're not competing in the same market as Salesforce.com."

But despite such a denial, Johnson still used the friendly forum of the premium sponsor's panel to score points over Marc Benioff and co.

He claimed SAP's customers - who are given an SLA of 99.5 per cent uptime - would have been put off by recent downtime at Salesforce.com, adding that his company is targeting far larger clients who couldn't tolerate such outages.

Anthony Lye, group VP CRM products at Oracle-Siebel, added: "Salesforce.com has done little more than deliver a very simple, easy to use application for small companies which are less formal about processes and less worried about regulatory issues."

Lye claimed Siebel's on-demand offering represents greater choice for his customers and said servicing customer demand with a choice of on-demand, on-premise and hybrid offerings is far more important than telling users what they have to use.

In another apparent dig at some of the outspoken pioneers who have long banged the drum for on-demand, Lye said: "We don't want to dictate a delivery model or pricing model.

"Our strategy is not to tell people how to be doing business."

Throughout the session both men did give greater credence to some claims of the on-demand pioneers, acknowledging the customers' need for ease of delivery, immediacy and customisation with their CRM.

However, both doubted the world would ever move towards an entirely online model.