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SYDNEY, Australia, June 17, 2019

Gartner Says Worldwide Customer Experience and Relationship Management Software Market Grew 15.6% in 2018

Analysts Discuss Technology Trends and Their Impact on Customer Experience at the Gartner Customer Experience & Technologies Summit in Sydney, June 17-18

Worldwide spending on customer experience and relationship management (CRM) software grew 15.6% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018, according to research from Gartner, Inc. CRM remains both the largest and the fastest growing enterprise application software category.

Worldwide enterprise application software revenue totaled more than $193.6 billion in 2018, a 12.5% increase from 2017 revenue of $172.1 billion. CRM made up almost a quarter of that revenue.

Approximately 72.9% of CRM spending was on software as a service (SaaS) in 2018, which is expected to grow to 75% of total CRM software spending in 2019, with agility and flexibility being big drivers, along with the requirement for remote and mobile users.

“Cloud growth has dropped slightly in 2018 but remains strong at 20% and significantly above the overall growth rate of 15.6% for CRM,” said Julian Poulter, senior director analyst at Gartner. “As an early mover to the cloud, CRM software is probably seeing a gradual reduction in cloud growth rates due to high adoption.”

The top five CRM software vendors accounted for more than 40% of the total market in 2018 (see Table 1). The top five vendors had very little change in ranking compared with 2017, although Microsoft climbed into fifth position, narrowly displacing Genesys.

Table 1

CRM Software Spending by Vendor, Total Software Revenue Worldwide, 2018 (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

Company

2018

Revenue

2018 Market

Share (%)

2017

Revenue

2017 Market

Share (%)

Salesforce

9,420.5

19.5

7,648.1

18.3

SAP

4,012.2

8.3

3,474.4

8.3

Oracle

2,669.0

5.5

2,492.9

6.0

Adobe

2,454.8

5.1

2,017.2

4.8

Microsoft

1,302.0

2.7

1,132.1

2.7

Others

28,371.7

58.8

24,962.0

59.9

Total

48,230.2

100.0

41,726.7

100.0

Source: Gartner (June 2019)

All subsegments of the CRM market grew by more than 13.7%, with marketing emerging as the fastest growing segment, increasing by 18.8% and representing more than 25% of the entire CRM market. Customer service and support retains its No. 1 position, contributing 35.7% of CRM market revenue.

“To exploit the significant market opportunity, product managers in CRM application providers should double down on cloud deployments and consider adding functionality in the fast growing marketing segment,” said Mr. Poulter.

Gartner clients can learn more in the report “Market Share: Customer Experience and Relationship Management, Worldwide, 2018.”

Gartner Customer Experience & Technologies Summits

Customer experience trends will be further discussed at the Gartner Customer Experience Summit 2019 taking place June 17-18 in Sydney. Follow news and updates from the event on Twitter at #GartnerCX

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) delivers actionable, objective insight to executives and their teams. Our expert guidance and tools enable faster, smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization’s mission critical priorities. To learn more, visit gartner.com.

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