Skip to main content

Gartner Magic Quadrant on CEC - some Musings

The May 2016 version of Gartner's magic quadrant sees SAP in a challenger position, with the favourite competition Salesforce, Oracle and Microsoft being leaders - all of them dwarfed by the perceived strength of Salesforce.
Lets have a brief look into what Gartner thinks about these four companies.

Salesforce

Salesforce is again a clear leader in the quadrant, mainly based upon the fact that they have the best sold solution, which is probably due to sticking effects of their other successful products. This attracts partners and apparently has become a kind of virtuous circle although there are a good number of shortcomings:
  • The product is missing industry specific functionality but is 'fairly generic'
  • lack of master data management functionality, which needs to come in via other products
  • the new Lightning development environment and user interface is far from mainstream
  • it is expensive and raises concerns about vendor lock in, especially when there are other components, too
  • important functionalities like mobile chat, best next action, e-mail and multichannel interaction routing, feedback management are better done with partner software
Given these shortcomings and Gartner's statement that Salesforce is strong for simpler service models only (as opposed to complex ones) one asks oneself how Gartner would explain the margin of leadership that the Magic Quadrant shows ...

Microsoft

Microsoft has put quite some effort into their Dynamics CRM product. It has become a true suite and integrates well with the productivity suite. Recent additions have strengthened the service foot print. My assessment is that it is justified that Salesforce is scared of Microsoft - which is what I hear. On top of the good functionality that the product offers it is also the one with the best price. And then there is Microsofts vision and ability to connect companies, consumers, and content.
Still customers report weaknesses ranging from poor workflow capabilities, which should have been improved with the newest release, to scalability issues and poorly trained partner consultants, if they are available at all. And before I forget: Dynamics is a horizontal product. Industry specifics need to come from the partner side. These clearly are points that Jujhar Singh and his team need to address.

Oracle

Oracle seemingly reconfirmed their commitment to the CRM world and spends more on R&D again. With all the mature acquired functionality that Oracle commands, including RightNow and Siebel, in combination with Oracle's strong worldwide presence and big number of customers there are some arguments for having the Oracle CEC solution(s) in the leaders' quadrant, including the ability to model complex processes.
On the negative side the pricing model is complicated, and there are a variety of implementation- and upgrade problems. Customising is tricky and one needs a .Net client. And then there are issues with the take-up by the large SIs and consultancies as well as doubts about Oracles commitment to a partner ecosystem. 

SAP

The SAP CEC solution is in transition. There are two competing products, SAP CRM with very strong functionality and the new C4C/Hybris products, which are not yet that strong. The Hybris world is the future, however, not yet really seen. As I myself have written and stated a number of times SAP's messaging is confusing at best.
In essence SAP sells a vision with its turn from on premise to first C4C, then Hybris/YaaS. This vision still needs to get proven while the lacking commitment to SAP CRM makes this product fall behind the pack although this is the product that is very strong in complex processes - and with a little help of the on-demand sisters can also do very well with social media. Field Service, self services, and analytics are a given at SAP.

Famous last Words

Although I cannot really understand the margin by which Gartner sees Salesforce lead the pack there is a very strong product. Personally I do see more scope in Microsoft, especially if they could decide to include industry specific functionality, especially considering the B2C side. When SAP finally gets their act sorted on the Hybris platform we will see a formidable player re-emerge here, too. In order to get this communicated proudly into the market I would see a need to engage better with the likes of Gartner again. Add influencers like Paul Greenberg. Bob Stutz successfully improved analyst and influencer perception of SAP CRM - which decreased again with him leaving. Here at least Microsoft and Salesforce have a huge advantage.

Comments

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

Sweet Transformation: Inside SugarCRM’s New Direction

Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts. From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors , which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news.  With David Roberts , who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree.  As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too.  This is what happened and happens with SugarCR...

SaaS or the Rise of the Undead

SaaS is dead! It will be replaced by agentic systems that replace coded business logic by AI agents that autonomously interact to bring said business logic to life, just smarter. Satya Nadella said it - or at least something in these lines, if I believe all the pundits around. His words lit up the Internet. And Satya Nadella being the CEO of a 3 trillion dollar company is the ultimate fount of truth and wisdom, when it comes to business applications. Is he not? So, what should we take from his statements? After all, the words of the CEO of one of the top 3 valuable companies on this Earth carry some weight. Let me start straight.  I call BS! SaaS, first of all, is a delivery model of logic that also had some implications on vendors‘ business models and their approaches to pricing. For a variety of good and not so good reasons this delivery model succeeded vs. the prevalent model of on-premises software. Some of the more important reasons have been “no lock in by vendors”, “only pay...

Zoho - A True Unicorn

End of January Zoho held its 2020 Zoho Days, an analyst summit, which I was happy to attend, along with more than 60 colleagues, as the only analyst from Germany, as it seems. Sadly, it took me quite a while to complete this – Zoho deserves a faster commentare. But hey, let’s look forward and get rolling. Zoho is a privately owned enterprise software company that has quietly evolved from a small software company in 1996 to an ambitious global player that serves the SMB- and enterprise CRM market with cloud applications. The company has a set of 45+ business apps with more than 50 million users, 10 data centres and counting, and is available in 180 countries. The company is profitable and maintained a CAGR of more than 30 percent over the past five years. But why quietly? Because Zoho managed its growth pretty unusually (almost) fully organically with only very minor acquisitions. Crunchbase lists one. Following this unique approach, which defies the tradit...

The CDP is dead – long live the CDP!

In the past few years, I have written about CDPs, what they are and what their value is – or rather can be. My definition of a CDP that I laid out in one of my column articles on CustomerThink is:  A Customer Data Platform is a software that creates persistent, unified customer records that enable business processes that have the customers’ interests and objectives in mind. It is a good thing that CDPs evolved from its origins of being a packaged software owned by marketers, serving marketers. Having looked at CDP’s as a band aid that fixes the proliferation of data silos that emerged for a number of reasons, I have ultimately come to the conclusion and am here to say that the customer data platform as an entity is increasingly becoming irrelevant – or in the typical marketing hyperbole – dead.  Why is that? There are mainly four reasons for it.  For one, many an application has its own CDP variant already embedded as part of enabling its core functionality. Any engageme...

ZohoDay 2025 Brings Enterprise Swagger to the Lake

Zoho held its annual ZohoDays outside of Austin in the beautiful Horseshoe Bay resort. While this is a good way away from Austin proper, it also gave the opportunity to have long and good conversations with Zoho execs, customers and fellow analysts outside of the conference and meeting rooms. And guess what, this is exactly what happened.  Big time kudos to Sandy Lo with her amazing team for organizing this and of course also to all the Zoho execs, including the newly minted Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s new CEO Mani Vembu, Tony Thomas, Raju Vegesna, Vijay Sundaram and many more, who all were more than willing to share information and, even more importantly, get feedback. The latter is not something that we analysts take for granted. Besides the usual – and important – state of the business update by Vijay Sundaram, the event revolved around three main topics ·       AI ·       Enterprise and partner strategy ·       Industry str...