Thank you Larry Goldman for mentioning vtiger CRM in your recent Customer Intelligence related article Marketing Automation: What Do We Do Now along with other major players in the marketing automation.
The marketing automation space continues to provide value for marketing functions across ranges of marketing sophistications. Some vendors to think about include:
- The options for application service providers campaign management models are getting better. Salesforce.com, RightNow and Siebel offer rental services.
- Siebel/Oracle probably remains the best campaign management tool for those vendors selling holistic CRM solutions.
- Unica is expanding their solution set to start covering all of the gray areas between marketing and other functions, such as lead management, Web analytics and multichannel offer management.
- Who are the key contenders? Aprimo has successfully integrated DoubleClick with their product set. Siebel and SAS have also stepped up their development and sales efforts in this area to try to fill the void of contenders.
- Some of the most interesting developments have surfaced in what has typically been the midmarket. Priced very aggressively, vendors such as Smart Focus and Decision Software may not have a full breadth of modules, but their campaign management functionality is very close to on par with the enterprise vendors.
- Open source is an interesting, if not adventuresome option. SugarCRM, vtiger, Centric CRM and Queplix offer solutions for those in the open source game.
