The Forrester Wave™: Customer Hubs, Q4 2006

Forrester evaluated leading customer hub vendors across 134 criteria in a demo-based product evaluation and found that IBM's WebSphere Customer Center and Siperian's Hub established dominant customer hub leadership — thanks to their best-in-class customer hub capabilities, harmonized reference approach, and heterogeneous focus. Initiate Systems leads pure plays with the strongest overall strategy, rich data cleansing, and customer battle-tested matching capabilities. Oracle-Siebel continues to demonstrate rich industry-specific capabilities, strong architecture, and the leading product strategy. Solid overall strategy, data deduplication, and hierarchy management bring VisionWare's .NET solution into the top Strong Performer slot, albeit focused on just the public sector. Meanwhile, Oracle Customer Data Hub (CDH) remains a Strong Performer but lacks the advanced data acquisition and data deduplication capabilities required for the Leader band. Newcomer Purisma is also a Strong Performer and delivers on advanced capabilities for B2B customers but lacks the advanced data acquisition and market presence required for the Leader band. ERP Leader SAP approaches the market seeking to adapt its Master Data Management solution for a customer world, but it still has work ahead to build a true customer hub. However, SAP continues to invest considerable resources and shows resolve and potential. Finally, Dun & Bradstreet remains a Contender as it evolves from trusted content provider to differentiate into a customer hub.