The Magic Gartners

Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, and IBM Global Business Services were named the leaders in Gartner’s prestigious "Magic Quadrant for CRM Service Providers, North America, 2007."

While market share and strong revenue numbers continue to propel North America-based CRM providers, Asian providers like Infosys and Wipro are steadily making inroads into the CRM market as vertical expertise, cost savings, and CRM domain know-how continue to propel revenue rates above the market average, according to the report.

Some highlights in the report included:

• Of the leaders, Accenture continues is a pace-setter; the report cites the provider’s higher-than-average growth rate in North America and its industry depth and process-specific focus in CRM.

• IBM Global Business Services lead all providers in completeness of vision. Gartner noted IBM’s breadth of CRM-specific expertise and technology/application services as attributes clients have found impressive.

• The Capgemini acquisition of Kanbay was noted for bolstering its financial services sector and received good marks for its industry expertise and business consulting.

• Deloitte got high praise for its development and integration of methodologies that link the use of CRM software to business objectives.

The challengers quadrant featured many providers headquartered in Asia, including Cognizant, Hitachi Consulting, Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro Technologies.

Overall, reported study authors, the market experienced annual growth of 9.2 percent in 2006, a notable increase over 2005’s 6.2 percent.

The old bugaboo is still there, though, as report authors note that "CRM solution implementation services are often the most expensive components of a CRM solution implementation.”

As a result, the trend of leveraging global delivery models when shopping and purchasing consulting services continues. A recent Gartner study of 149 CRM initiatives in North America revealed that 46 percent of projects involve the use of offshore resources, up from 33 percent from a similar study in 2006.