SAP bestrides the customer resource management (CRM) sector like a colossus. For most small and medium businesses (SMBs), SAP is still seen as some master of the universe - remote, expensive and beyond the reach of modest-sized firms.

SAP www.sap.com rejects the characterisation while accepting the perceptions. It even quotes its own SMB customers: “SAP was too large for us”, “SAP is for huge multinationals” and “They [SAP] are for the big boys”, opinions expressed before they saw the light and became committed SAP disciples.

Delivering CRM as an on-demand service may or may not be beyond the capability of SAP itself but it certainly amplified its reach enormously by partnering with IBM. A customer has access to SAP CRM experts 24x7. At the same time, with IBM hosting, it has an “always-on” operating environment. Flexible pricing is there for both small and large businesses.

But what of the competition? The obvious candidates are Microsoft and Oracle.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx is an on-demand service hosted and managed by Microsoft over the Internet. It delivers a full suite of marketing, sales and service capabilities through a Web browser or directly into Microsoft Office and Outlook. All this comes without the need for any IT infrastructure investment or set-up.
Nevertheless implementation may be easier for HP customers because of the partnership between the two companies. HP also offers the Sage suite of CRM applications for SMBs. Many smaller outfits would probably feel comfortable with the SMB background of Sage – but it is not yet available on-demand only on HP blades.

Then there is Oracle www.oracle.com which, to the casual SMB observer, seems a complex and intimidating beast. As well as the eponymous software, Oracle also has JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel in its stable. Yet in its CRM On Demand Release 15 it offers software-as-a-service with the latest Web 2.0 capabilities. Its capabilities are impressive but its scalability may be suspect and at the present time of asking may not be the most suitable for SMBs.

So SMBs are no longer excluded from the the world of CRM. Many of them may feel, however, that it is an exotic world too far removed from their day-to-day experience, practice and needs.