The Roundup: Happy With Your CRM Implementation?

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Satisfied With Your CRM?

Satisfied with your company’s customer-relationship management
initiatives? A recent Cutter Consortium study found that more than
three-quarters of 159 surveyed companies said yes.

The report is evidence that CRM initiatives –a high priority of many IT
execs right now– are not failing as often as some might think.

On a six-point scale, 4 percent of respondents said they were extremely
satisfied with their CRM operations; 36 percent were satisfied; 37 percent were
mildly satisfied; 5 percent were disappointed; 17 percent were mildly disappointed;
and 1 percent were extremely disappointed.

Unsurprisingly, Cutter found that “retaining customers” is the main
force driving CRM adoption.

More Good News For E-Commerce

Hardly a week goes by without some analyst firm trumpeting the great
growth it forecasts for e-commerce (such as last week’s
Roundup summarizing a report from Jupiter Media Metrix).

This week’s glowing prediction comes from the analysts at
International Data Corp., who say Internet sales will top $5 trillion
annually by 2005, as nearly 1 billion people (15 percent of the world’s
population) go online.

Based on 2000 online global online spending of $354 billion, that
amounts to what IDC trumpets as a “staggering” 70 percent compound
annual growth rate for e-commerce.

IDC finds that despite the high-profile failure of many e-commerce
sites in recent months, there are more than 100 million new Internet
users each year. But beyond consumer-level spending, IDC notes that
large-scale corporate purchasing over the Web is “just getting cranked
up.”

Add to that the rise of portable devices for accessing the Internet, like
mobile phones and handheld devices, and “you have a scenario for
explosive growth,” IDC reports.

IDC also says that in years to come, Net usage will not be dominated
by a single region. One likely scenario: The U.S., which accounted for
34 percent of Internet users in 2000 (making it first in the world), will fall to
third place as growth there slows and more users go online in
Asia and Europe. Over time, those areas will rival each other
for the most Net users.

U.S. Government Top Online Seller

Think Amazon.com is the top e-commerce retailer? Think again. A
report in Federal Computer Week says that, by a wide margin, the
U.S. government sells more stuff online than anyone else.

The feds sold more than $3.6 billion worth of items over the Web in
2000, far ahead of Amazon’s $2.8 billion in sales.

The bulk of the sales ($3.3 billion) were investment vehicles such as
U.S. savings bonds, Treasury bills and notes, sold by the Treasury
Department.

Other items included excess property and assets (including wild
horses, Coast Guard-owned homes, blues recordings from the Library
of Congress, old Army trucks and sports cars seized in fraud cases),
plus more pedestrian items such as postage stamps and sweatshirts.

A study found that a U.S. government operates or supports at least
164 Web sites selling something to the public. The report cites some
difficulties with the government’s approach to e-commerce, including
the lack of marketing for most of its sites. Also, there is no single place
online where the government consolidates all its e-commerce
offerings.

There is one angle the government has over giants like Amazon and
others: Nowhere does it say the government has to make a profit
online.

Database Giants Still Waging War

Who’s the undisputed king of worldwide database software market? If
you said Oracle, move to the head of the class.

The California database giant kept a slight lead over IBM during 2000. It
increased its market share in the global database software market
(DBMS) to 33.8 percent, up from 31.4 percent in 1999, according to a recent report
from Gartner Dataquest.

Second-place IBM (30.1 percent, up from 29.9 percent in 1999) was followed by
Microsoft (14.9 percent), Sybase (3.2 percent), and Informix (3 percent). All other
competitors, categorized as a group, split the remaining 15 percent of
market share.

But like seemingly everything else in the IT market these days,
database software sales are softer than a year earlier.

Gartner Dataquest said the downturn in the U.S. economy in the
second half of 2000 continued to extend sales cycles, resulting in
slower growth in what has been a robust market. Worldwide new
license revenue hit $8.8 billion in 2000, a 10 percent increase over 1999
revenue. That was far below the 18 percent growth experienced in 1999.

In 1999, more than half of the software vendors has double-digit
growth, but in 2000 only 35 percent of vendors reached that mark.

Betsy Burton, vice president and research area director for Gartner,
said the numbers show that “despite the market consolidation, the
DBMS market share wars are far from over. IBM, Microsoft and Oracle
will continue to battle for DBMS market dominance with the major
influencing factors being ISV and applications support, pricing, depth of
OS platform support and DBMS scalability and availability.”