Briefs

April 25, 2002. IDC released findings from a recent study this week that predicts worldwide CRM services will surpass $45 billion by 2006, growing at a blistering 18.6 percent compound annual growth rate. Similarly, Dataquest, a business unit of Gartner Group, forecasted earlier this month that the CRM service market would reach $47 billion by 2006, up from $25.3 billion this year.

Not surprisingly, a chunk of the market -- more than $18 billion -- will come from the U.S. The growth of the U.S. CRM services market dwarfs the overall U.S. IT services market, which has a CAGR of 12 percent. But the U.S. will lose market share to faster growing regions such as Asia-Pacific and Western Europe.

IDC reported that the top vertical industries for CRM services revenue in the U.S. last year were communications and media, discrete manufacturing, and banking. The fastest-growing opportunities this year include insurance; government; transportation services; and utilities.

It should also be noted that worldwide CRM services revenue has decreased significantly from previous IDC forecasts. The CRM project landscape has also shifted, as companies move from revenue-generating initiatives to cost-savings initiatives.

On the heels of CRM services, customer-care outsourcing will also likely surge. Customer-care outsourcing, as defined by IDC, is the provisioning of customer interaction, fulfillment, logistics services and, critically, CRM hosting services. Customer-care outsourcing and CRM consulting services should reach $90.3 billion by 2006, up from $34.9 billion last year.

see http://www.destinationcrm.com/dcrm_ni_article.asp?id=1383&art=news

at the same time Datamonitor reports that in the pharmaceutical industry, high costs and cultural hurdles stymie great expectations

Here's the scary truth of it, according to findings from a study by London-based researcher Datamonitor: Forty-four percent of pharmaceutical CRM projects either fail to meet implementation time scales or result in total project failure. High-costs and cultural resistance continue to stymie many great expectations.

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=3608