Not that long ago, the answer would have been a decided no. However, over the last few years -- and especially in the last 12 to 18 months -- all the enterprise vendors have made serious attempts to penetrate this market space, with varying degrees of success.

For example, Oracle, which for the most part is associated with high-end deals, "has spent a lot of time and energy , in conjunction with our Advanced User Interface Laboratory, to develop UIs (user interfaces) for our products that are easy to use," Andrew Kass, vice president of CRM, told CRMDaily.com.

"This is especially important in corporations where employees often have to perform several different functions, or need to focus on efficiency of operations."

Flight to Quality

For the moment, though, the mid-size vendors, with their specially designed products built from the ground up, are holding their own, despite evidence that many CRM buyers are giving in to a flight-to-quality instinct and gravitating toward brand names in uncertain economic times.

To give buyers an idea of what is available on both sides of the vendor spectrum -- as well as points in between -- CRMDaily caught up with a few vendors that are representative of their market, business model and product offering.

Quintessentially SMB

ACT!, basically a gussied-up contact management application, is the quintessential small business application for the low end of the market.

ACT! 6.0 was released in August of this year. The main upgrade was a new e-mail client and improved integration with Microsoft Outlook. (Indeed, tighter integration with Outlook has become an expected feature, although, as most users know, some applications link better to this tool than others.)

Now, for example, users can attach Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents to a contact record and view them without launching a separate application. Also, they can map fields from their database to fields in Excel for quoting.

Dubious Distinction

Like ACT!, SalesLogix is part of the Best Software family -- the vendor that has achieved the dubious distinction of being viewed as the first likely casualty when Microsoft enters the CRM market. Earlier this fall, SalesLogix rolled out a release that included a new tiered architecture and enhanced features designed to make life easier for sales reps, the primary user base in this space. (continued...)

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