New Poll: Who will win the CRM wars?

Blackbaud, Convio, Internet, Kintera, Polls, nptech, salesforce.com

New Poll: Who will win the CRM wars?

01.17.07 | Comments

Chime in with your answer on who will win the CRM wars? Convio, Kintera, Blackbaud, Salesforce.com, or none of the above? Now that Convio merged with GetActive, I’m curious to see what you all think…

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On 01.17.07 hayduke said:

I don’t see how this list of vendors can be grouped together. There is some overlap, of course, and probably some competition amongst them. But there is little of that and there will clearly be less. It’s an opportunity for the ’smaller’ and more creative folks – be they more or less proprietary vendors or open source developers/implementors. How this all evolves is interesting but the poll question seems moot.

On 01.18.07 abenamer said:

I have to disagree but then again, I left the “None of the Above” option available. There will be MORE competition among these vendors, not less. Let’s take a tactical view of the competition:

If you were an IT director looking for new CRM services, I believe that those four would be the first set of vendors you’d look at. How could you not? Chances are, you probably already have Blackbaud so NetCommunity would be something to look at. Convio already just ate GetActive. Kintera is a no go. Have you taken a look at its stock recently? Yikes. Salesforce.com is giving it away for FREE.

The traditional low-end CRM, ebase, doesn’t really work well for more than single-user entry. One COULD take a look at the rest of the market, CiviCRM, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, et al but you could easily group those together and they probably would have a minuscule share of the nonprofit market.

I certainly welcome innovation and more competition but right now market forces (partly dictated due to lack of CRM adoption by nonprofits themselves) are hammering CRM vendors. There’s no oxygen for them anymore because all the nonprofits that would have jumped to a CRM already have done so. Convio has far less than a thousand clients. What does it say for our sector that so few have joined? Obviously, half the development directors are still stuck on direct mail and don’t believe the web hype (2.0 or 1.0). So no, the market has matured somewhat and we should expect to see more consolidation unless nonprofit development directors see the light.

On 01.18.07 hayduke said:

Your list can’t be grouped together. Groups that were comparing GetActive and Convio were never looking at Blackbaud. My experience is that most groups started down this path with online advocacy (tons of email) and have backed into CRM aspects, sometimes w/o even knowing it. But b/c data integration never existed between member/donor systems and online advocacy it has been hard for groups big and small that have been doing this for years to move to eCRM systems of any kind.

On 01.18.07 abenamer said:

You have a great perspective on the matter and one that I didn’t quite understand until your last comment. A geneaological take on this issue is one that I hadn’t quite considered. However, your last sentence about the lack of data integration between member/donor systems and online advocacy is precisely the kind of niche that Blackbaud and salesforce.com want to address. This is why I group Blackbaud in the list.

They are both willing to integrate the two systems – Blackbaud’s pitch is “stay with the Blackbaud family” and salesforce.com is “we can integrate with anyone but you already have it with our nonprofit apps module and just customize it to your heart’s content”. Blackbaud was never looked at in the first few years of eCRM simply beacuse Blackbaud’s offering were frankly, pathetic. I’m a Raiser’s Edge NetSolutions customer — it’s a very sad and neglected module. So sad and neglected that Blackbaud essentially dumped it and rearchitected it and called it NetCommunity.

NetCommunity is moving nicely along and I believe that Kintera’s weakness and Convio’s small revenue stream plus Blackbaud’s continuing mindshare especially with those nonprofits that have yet to do eCRM means that that product will have to be given CRM consideration. Blackbaud is too big and too entrenched with Raiser’s Edge not to be able to make a dent in eCRM eventually.

On 01.19.07 Peggy said:

What do you think about Blackbaud’s purchase of Target Software? The two architectures seem completely different…do you think Blackbaud will try and integrate or leave Target alone? Are they just after the customer base? This purchase confuses me.

On 01.19.07 abenamer said:

That’s just what Wall Street is saying too. One analyst promptly downgraded his rating of the stock saying that there was too much overlap between Blackbaud and Target. However, another analyst upgraded the stock rating today saying that there was no overlap at all and that the purchase was complementary. For little cost ($60 million is chump change for BLKB), they gain entry to the top end of nonprofit marketing tools plus it freezes out the competition.

On 02.18.07 Jeff Gordy said:

This market is just starting to heat up. I did an in depth analysis of the CRM vendors, and actually chose one that was not on your list. I found NEON by Z2 Systems to be much more advanced, and more reasonable priced that the companies you listed. With all of the mergers & buyouts going on, I think the CRM giants are just going to continue to raise their pricing and will lose out to their more agile competitors.

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