Worldwide customer relationship management (CRM) software revenue totaled $US26.3 billion in 2015, up 12.3 percent from 23.4 billion in 2014, according to Gartner, Inc.

"The merger and acquisition activity that began flowing through the market in 2009 continued in 2015, with more than 30 notable acquisitions, Julian Poulter, research director at Gartner.

“This has resulted in increased competition at the top end of the CRM market, with the continued focus of global vendors' sales forces driving good growth worldwide in all CRM subsegments but only for cloud or software as a service (SaaS) applications."

Overall, the top five CRM software vendors accounted for more than 45 percent of the total market in 2015 (see Table 1). The top five vendors had very little change in ranking compared with 2014, although Adobe jumped into the fifth position, displacing IBM, as it continues to lead the CRM marketing segment with a focus on marketing agencies and the chief marketing officer (CMO).

In Australia, the vendor landscape looks slightly different, with Salesforce at 21.8 percent of the A$981.8 million market in 2015, followed by Oracle (11.7 percent), Genesys (7.9 percent), Microsoft (5.1 percent) and SAP (4.8 percent).

In New Zealand, Salesforce had 23.7 percent of the NZ$101.8 million market in 2015, followed by Oracle (12 percent), Microsoft (9.4 percent), SAP (6.5 percent) and IBM (5.3 percent).

CRM Software Spending by Vendor, Total Software Revenue Worldwide, 2015 (Millions of US Dollars)

Source: Gartner (May 2016)

"CRM growth is driven by cloud service revenue, which, in the application space, uses SaaS as the major delivery model," said Mr. Poulter. "SaaS revenue grew 27 percent year over year, which is more than double overall CRM market growth in 2015. On-premises new license revenue declined one percent for the same period."

Salesforce continued to dominate the CRM market in 2015, with 19.7 percent of the market. Salesforce leads in revenue in the sales and customer service and support (CSS) segments of CRM, and it is now third in revenue in the marketing segment, where it is the fastest-growing segment among the top five.

Emerging Asia/Pacific grew the fastest, with growth of 21.9 percent in 2015, closely followed by greater China with 18.4 percent growth. Middle East and North Africa and mature Asia/Pacific both achieved double-digit growth at 10.7 and 10.2 percent, respectively.

Detailed analysis is available to Gartner clients in the report "Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2015."