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The potential for a brief hiatus in technology growth gives IT management an opportunity to evaluate and enhance the business technology infrastructure and infrastructure management. Concurrently, the maturation of the ITIL model for infrastructure and service management provides a framework for potential improvements. With most tool vendors releasing ITIL-based solutions in current versions, and with the majority of current service desk software users using prior versions of these tools, times are ripe for a mass migration to a new service desk process and tool model.
Forrester observed some core differences between eService projects in North America and Europe, particularly in business process orientation and the bridging of front- and back-office processes. Further, the multilingual requirements of European customers create more challenges than in the usual English-centric operations of North America. North American companies should look to Europe for a hint of how eService priorities will change in light of process automation and as consumers continue to adopt broadband connections and embrace nonphone channels.
Forrester talked with 22 large organizations in North America, Europe, and Asia to understand their methods for achieving business performance improvement through investment in CRM initiatives. Organizations spend heavily to improve customer-facing processes, but they still struggle to achieve satisfactory returns on their effort. Despite these challenges, CRM leaders are learning what it takes to succeed. They use 10 best practices to address five critical issues: governance, process management, data management, user adoption, and technology. As a result, these businesses have captured four types of benefits: increased revenues, lower costs, higher return on investment, and improved competitive strength.
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Applications Software Licensing, Q4 2005
Enterprise application vendors face pressure to deliver simplified licensing metrics while modeling the complexity of business around usage. In addition, vendors are striving to enforce consistency in licensing policies while accommodating flexibility throughout the software life cycle. However, enterprises seek two paradigms: simple licensing metrics with flexible licensing policies and sophisticated licensing metrics with flexible licensing policies. In the Enterprise Applications Software Licensing Wave, Q4 2005, R. "Ray" Wang compares the top ERP vendors across 65 criteria that examine how these vendors address simplicity versus complexity and consistency versus flexibility.
New licensing preferences are emerging. A recent Forrester survey of 100 business users and IT executives asked, "How do you license your ERP software, and how would you like to license in the future?" Three clear trends emerged across all sizes of businesses: a shift away from named user licenses, a shift from existing usage-based models to enterprisewide licenses, and a dislike of processor-specific metrics. But how are vendors doing in meeting the evolving licensing needs of companies?
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The results: Vendors like Epicor Software, Oracle, and QAD scored higher in accommodating complex license metrics and flexible licensing policies, while vendors like Epicor, Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS), and SAP scored higher in delivering simplified license metrics and flexible licensing policies.
The Forrester Wave™: Midmarket On-Premise Sales Force Automation, Q4 2005
Small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) continue to invest in sales force automation (SFA), and many seek an on-premise deployment rather than one of the increasingly popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) options. To assess the state of midmarket on-premise SFA applications and see how the vendors stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top midmarket on-premise SFA vendors across 151 criteria. This evaluation complements the April 2005 Forrester Wave™ evaluation of the hosted SFA market. The result: Siebel Professional Edition, Sage CRM SalesLogix, and Pivotal are best-suited for medium-size firms, while FrontRange and Maximizer Software fit the needs of small businesses. Included in this report is an interactive vendor comparison tool that provides detailed product evaluations and customizable rankings.
From The Editor
The Enterprise Applications/Business Process Platform team has been very busy this quarter creating multiple Forrester Wave™ evaluations. In addition to the reports shown in this First Look, several more Waves are under way. In the next few weeks, you'll find Noha Tohamy's Wave on Transportation Solutions and Chip Gliedman's Wave on the IT Help Desk. Coming in Q1 2006 will be a new Wave covering Order Management and my updated eService Wave.
In addition to Wave activities, we've found time to provide you with some Best Practices reports, as well as some Trend pieces to assist with your 2006 planning.
I would like to personally wish all of you a wonderful holiday season and a very happy New Year.
Please feel free to send any comments to me at johnragsdale@forrester.com.
John Ragsdale
Vice President, Research Director
johnragsdale@forrester.com
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