Just came across this white paper at Computerworld which is a comparision of the On Demand providers by Nucleus research last year, here are some excerpts from the same:




The functionality war is on in on-demand CRM - particularly in the analytics space. Going beyond a few pre-canned reports and dashboards, on-demand CRM analytics should enable both users and managers to view and track performance and opportunities.This is one area of the market that's evolving very rapidly.

Integration of data from other applications is key to leveraging more value from on-demand CRM; the challenge is where and how to do it. New player SmartCompany has an interesting approach that provides integration through a small desktop client; Siebel is betting on its hybrid model; Salesforce.com continue to announce new developments to its sforce integration toolkit.

Real value from on-demand CRM comes beyond pocket deployments to manage contact histories to a broader CRM infrastructure that provides a single view of the customer across the organization.

As on-demand CRM technology has developed, the big question is not necessarily whether or not customers achieve an initial ROI, but whether or not the solution continues to deliver enough value to justify its use over another solution. Nucleus recently found that 38 percent of Salesforce.com customers had either already planned or would consider adoption of another CRM solution.
Many companies that didn't select an on-demand solution with an overall CRM strategy in mind have already moved on - either to another on-demand solution or to a traditional software application.

There are two lessons here: first, training and management focus as just as important in maximizing ROI as with traditional CRM; second, if your users are only using basic functionality there will be a cheaper or better on-demand solution coming along that you should consider to keep delivering ROI.

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Prashanth Rai