The customer relationship management spend.(IT By The Numbers)

Gartner believes hosted CRM software is an idea whose time has come. The Stamford, Conn.-based research firm foresees businesses investing close to $1 billion in hosted CRM applications by 2009. That would represent a five-year compound annual growth rate of 41 percent. Meanwhile, Gartner expects purchases of on-premise CRM applications to decline by 2.4 percent over the same time period. Gartner also expects small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to drive the growth of hosted CRM, predicting that 33 percent of SMBs will have adopted the model by 2009.

Reasons for this migration, according to Gartner:

* Hosted CRM is cheaper

* It's easier to implement

* Newer versions nearly match on-premise functionality

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