IDC Predicts Big Growth in CRM Market - Industry Trend or Event - Brief Article

ENT, August 16, 2000

The industry research firm IDC recently released a report in which the company predicts enormous growth for the customer relationship management (CRM) market over the next four years.

IDC (www.idc.com) looked at the development of CRM solutions within the context of a closed-loop CRM system. It is the data warehousing aspect of the closed-loop CRM system that the research firm expects will experience phenomenal growth.

As part of its research, IDC outlined the critical steps for establishing a closed-loop CRM system. These include the incorporation of customer interaction, customer data integration, customer data analysis, and customer interaction personalization.

At the end of 1999, sales in the CRM market -- including software and services -- came in under $4.2 billion. By 2004, IDC predicts gross CRM revenue will surpass $20 billion. More than half of the current revenue total is generated by software sales, but it is expected that services will make up about 55 percent of all revenue by 2004.

IDC says companies providing CRM services and software solutions will be in the best position to help develop the evolving CRM-centric data warehousing model.