With the growing number of customer relationship management (CRM) vendors starting to offer software-as-a-service (SaaS) as a delivery method, users are spoilt for choice.
And the appeal of SaaS CRM is growing.
Sau Lam, an analyst with AMI-Partners, estimated in October 2007 the market demand for SaaS is "snowballing".
According Springboard Research figures, the Asia-Pacific SaaS CRM market, excluding Japan, grew by an estimated 68 percent in 2007, and is expected to reach US$460 million by 2010, up from US$69 million in 2006.
However, response to SaaS has been mixed.
Some companies do not trust SaaS when it comes to critical functions. Indra Utoyo, Telkom Indonesia's IT director and CIO told ZDNet Asia recently: "For applications like CRM and ERP (enterprise resource planning), we are not going to use SaaS because we consider these as a core platform and it's better to have them on-site."
On the other hand, Temasek Holdings CIO and CTO, Charles Koh, said last month placing his CRM in the hands of Salesforce.com has freed his department from maintaining servers, allowing its staff to innovate instead.
Whichever method you choose, here is a list of prices from some of the SaaS CRM market leaders.
| SaaS CRM price chart | ||
| Vendor | Product | Price | What you get |
| Salesforce.com | Unlimited edition | US$195/user/month | 120MB/user, offline access, mobile, unlimited custom apps, premier support |
| Oracle CRM On Demand | US$70/user/month | Mobile access, calendar integration, PIM integration, BlackBerry support |
| Zoho | Enterprise edition | US$25/user/month | Sales force and marketing automation, auto-responders, customer support, workflow management, 500MB storage |
| Microsoft | Dynamics CRM** | A$65-A$89.95 (US$62-US$86) | Integration with Excel, SQL mirroring support, presence management, Windows workflow, offline reporting, Web mail merge |
| SugarCRM | Enterprise edition | US$900/annum | Offline synchronization, unlimited users, dedicated application, database and server, Ajax Web mail |
| NetSuite CRM | US$79/user/month | Dashboards, marketing and sales force automation |
| SAP declined to disclose its pricelist. **As there is no official price list for Microsoft, this is a price quotation from two Australian hosting partners. | ||
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