Can anyone catch Salesforce.com in the CRM space? If so, how?

'Never' is a very long time, but Salesforce has a pretty insurmountable lead right now. As long as they continue to push the envelope and innovate, there's no reason to expect any alternative to 'catch' them anytime soon.

To their credit, they are a company who has expressly NOT rested on their laurels - which is how they've gotten to the position they're in.

Having said all that, the definition of 'CRM' continues to evolve, it's always possible that trends could shift and catch them off-guard. If anyone does catch them (which is bound to happen - eventually) it may well be an alternative that none of us have ever heard of or considered.

To throw out the question "Can anyone catch Salesforce.com in the CRM space?" is such a wide open topic. Catch them in terms of what? It depends on what you are using as the "measuring stick".

First, in terms of pure CRM functionality Salesforce has not eclipsed many of the players in terms of features and functions. Without the extended application environment in a pure CRM comparison there is still a shortfall in core feature set.

Next, in terms of the extended application market it is unlikely that anyone will ever catch Salesforce as they have done a great job in making it easy to extend the platform in a number of areas and made it easy for the community to fill the feature/function shortfall and they don't necessarily need to spend their R&D on core feature set.

The most likely area of opportunity when it comes to Salesforce having vulnerability is in the area of market share. Economics always come into play and there is significant price pressure in our market that is being forced by none other than Microsoft. The Salesforce offering is relatively expensive over the long term and the new release of CRM 2011 has full development capabilities with their cloud offering and is priced significantly less that most other competitive products.

The reality is that all providers have resource limitations and cost structures that need to be maintained. When looking at economic principles of Adam Smith eventually everyone "comes back to the pack" in the long term so the approach that Salesforce has to innovation and looking for new opportunities for competitive advantage will be key in staying one step ahead. Their leadership has clearly shown commitment to this approach and only time will tell how good they are at making the right decisions with their resources.

Sure. Someone could offer a better set of offerings for both customers and partners, and at a better price, or SalesForce could make mistakes.

Will that happen anytime soon? There's no real way to say. I don't see any current indicators that SalesForce.com is in trouble, and it's already dealing with a variety of competitors.

If they keep moving ahead effectively and providing good value, they will continue to grow, and the overall CRM market will continue to grow. There's still a great deal of money to be made in this segment...

I'm certain that Microsoft will stay hot on their heels for as long as both of them are existance...

Salesforce.com (SFDC) is so deep and has so much traction given it's Application Exchange (APEX) strategy, it will very difficult for anyone to catch them. The strategy- "there is an app for that"- like Apple, is what I believe makes SFDC leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft(MSFT).

I agree that Microsoft is a strong contender, but SFDC does a nice job integrating with the MSFT products if that's the argument in favor of MSFT...email products integrated with SFDC are an exception in my opinion- SFDC needs to really work on improving those integrations!

As a company building products for CRM and social media space, I can say that Salesforce APIs and open nature of the platform are leagues ahead of the rest. They make it so easy to sign up as a software partner and provide development environment on the cloud, good partner support etc. It will be difficult to catch up with them in the larger enterprise space. The SMB section has a lot of competition from likes of Zoho.

Jeff

Once Siebel had an unassailable lead in CRM - but eventually SAP caught up.(Enterprise)

Salesforce certainly has a big lead across the market, but Microsoft Dynamics and SugarCRM are ramping up efforts.

Yesterday, I looked at Google Insights( you need an Adwords account I believe?) and looked at the CRM category for the past 30 days globally. The top 3 were Microsoft Dynamics queries and 5 of top 10 were for that product set. sfdc did not rank within the generic category - not sure if this is my question or a true reflection of the interest. ( I need to look at this more).

To answer the question directly - can they be caught? Sure if they don't execute well or someone works out an imaginative new way of going to market, build something great or if the market changes and they got it wrong. On the other hand, it may be a decade before this happens.

As a consultant may say - "It depends :-) "

Note: Google Insights is a much improved tool based on the "trends" product

While Salesforce dominates the general 'CRM' arena, there are CRM-niche-areas popping up all over the place, and this makes it a lot harder for someone to properly tell who's going to 'catch' salesforce.

For example, CRM was originally designed for larger businesses (ERP) and because of the availability of technology today, many small businesses use CRM systems, project management systems, and other helpful business management tools.

The software type that is growing steadily in the SMB CRM market is a more integrated approach to business management, putting CRM, project management, billing, and other tools into one system. WORKetc is an example of this, integrating the aspects just mentioned into one web based SaaS, catered to small businesses of 1-100. WORKetc is seeing a faster growth because smaller sized businesses are becoming much less tolerant with the lack of integration that ERP-focused CRM systems offer. Salesforce being an example - as it doesn't integrate all that well with project management systems, billing, and other tools - not nearly as well as WORKetc does it: (this details the integration) http://www.worketc.com/business_crm

Smaller businesses aren't supposed to be using ERP tools, they aren't made to fit their workflow. It's more problematic than anything!