Chinese software firms will dominate the mainland market for customer relationship management (CRM) applications in the next two years, trumping larger vendors such as Siebel and Oracle.
A report from London-based research firm Datamonitor said the Chinese market for CRM systems - software used to automate enterprises' marketing programmes and customer contacts - would favour local outfits that offer lower-cost products.
Evan Kirchheimer, lead analyst at Datamonitor's CRM research programme, said very few enterprise customers in China had an appetite for Western software licence prices.
'Selling at dramatic discounts has been a tactic used [by Western multinational software firms] to seed the market, but that practice is unsustainable,' he said.
Datamonitor found local CRM suppliers Powerise, OpenTide, AsiaInfo and China Objects had started to compete strongly against Western suppliers that included Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Pivotal and Onyx.
Chinese specialists in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, such as UFSoft, Kingdee and Attention Business Systems, are also expected to enter the mainland CRM market soon.
Besides offering competitive products at lower prices, local CRM players are also credited with getting more support from Chinese resellers.
