After a very nice Easter weekend, I found myself stuck like an old record on my April 1,post about how SFA happens outside the company and does not depend on existing customer data or processes, particularly when you are looking for new customers. Applications that can be quickly deployed,used and benefits seen make obvious sense for folks who want to sell more units of the same old widget.Therefore the Gartner report for CRM does not come as a great surprise. But enough!
What happens when you want to handle the front end of New Product Development? This phase involves ideas, idea screening,concept and perhaps prototype development and concept testing. With global teams working simultaneously on projects web based PLM applications are a big hit. This Collaborative Product Definition Management (cPDm-interesting abbreviation) ) segment is doing great and fore casted at almost 14% growth and will have 13B$ sales in the 30B$ PLM market in 2011 according to this report -UGS corp is leading in this segment.
Once again, just as the SFA front end of CRM can be stand alone it makes sense that the cPDm front end of PLM is also finding a good market in stand alone SaaS applications.