Batere Monitoring System dengan AKCP, solusi untuk memastikan perangkat batere dan genset anda berfungsi baik.
Solusi ini menggunakan sensor Battery Health Sensor dari AKCP. Jenis sensor ini dapat dikoneksikan ke main unit terkecil, seperti AKCP SP2+.
Fitur dari Battery Health Sensor adalah :
Temperature of the battery terminal
Voltage output from batteries or panel array
Current load on batteries or charging circuit
Jenis sensor ini dapat digunakan untuk monitoring battery bank, solar panel array atau generator starter batteries.
Informasi detail produk bisa diakses dilihat di datasheet terlampir
Selain itu, pada umumnya diperlukan sensor drycontact untuk bisa menerima sinyal sensor dari Genset, atau perangkat lain. Dapat menggunakan sensor DryContact 5 yang berisikan 5 dry contact sensor.
Kedua jenis sensor tadi terkoneksi ke main unit AKCP SP2+ , yang juga memiliki opsi untuk koneksi 4G.
Untuk mendapatkan penawaran harga atas solusi ini silahkan kontak tim sales kami, atau email ke dcim@dayaciptamandiri.com / dcmsales@dayaciptamandiri.com
It has been a great year for AKCP so far, we would like to thank all our dealers and customers worldwide for your continued support. In addition to exciting new product releases we have been engaged in some interesting projects. I'd like to share with you below some of those projects. They illustrate the diverse way in which AKCP monitoring solutions can be deployed.
It has been a great year for AKCP so far, we would like to thank all our dealers and customers worldwide for your continued support. In addition to exciting new product releases we have been engaged in some interesting projects. I'd like to share with you below some of those projects. They illustrate the diverse way in which AKCP monitoring solutions can be deployed.
It has been a great year for AKCP so far, we would like to thank all our dealers and customers worldwide for your continued support. In addition to exciting new product releases we have been engaged in some interesting projects. I'd like to share with you below some of those projects. They illustrate the diverse way in which AKCP monitoring solutions can be deployed.
It has been a great year for AKCP so far, we would like to thank all our dealers and customers worldwide for your continued support. In addition to exciting new product releases we have been engaged in some interesting projects. I'd like to share with you below some of those projects. They illustrate the diverse way in which AKCP monitoring solutions can be deployed.
My application is slow" is a common complaint heard at the help desk from frustrated users.
IT performance management is not just monitoring CPU, memory or disk space any more, you have to be able to quickly determine what the real cause of the problem is - is it in the network, the database, the application, storage, container, or cloud?
Join this Total Performance Management workshop and learn some of the best practices for developing a sustainable performance management strategy and how to troubleshoot and prevention performance issues with proactive management so even before a user complains their application is slow, you can pinpoint exactly where the cause of a problem - ensuring quick resolution and a positive user experience.
Kami mengundang kehadiran bapak/ibu dan rekan-rekan semua untuk mengikuti webinar yang kami adakan. Dalam webinar ini akan membahas PRTG For Healthcare Industry. Dimana kita akan mempelajari bersama -sama solusi aplikasi monitoring yang dibutuhkan untuk industry healthcare.
Temukan pembahasan lengkapnya dengan mengikuti webinar PRTG For Healthcare Industry pada :
Hari, Tanggal : Jumat, 20 Agustus 2021, Jam : 14.00 - 16.00 WIB
Kami mengundang kehadiran bapak/ibu dan rekan-rekan semua untuk mengikuti webinar yang kami adakan. Dalam webinar ini akan membahas Maximize Your Service Using CREATIO.
Temukan pembahasan lengkapnya dengan mengikuti webinar Maximize Your Service Using CREATIO pada :
Hari, Tanggal : Rabu, 25 Agustus 2021, Jam : 14.00 - 16.00 WIB
Enterprises have significantly accelerated their use of public CIPS providers as they seek to scale and become more agile in the postpandemic period. Major differences between the providers warrant careful consideration as I&O leaders make strategic cloud provider selections.
Market Definition/Description
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using internet technologies. Gartner defines the cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) market as standardized, highly automated offerings, in which infrastructure resources (e.g., compute, networking and storage) are complemented by integrated platform services. These include managed application, database and functions as-a-service offerings. The resources are scalable and elastic in near-real time and are metered by use. Self-service interfaces, including a web-based user interface (UI) and an API, are exposed directly to the customer. The resources may be single-tenant or multitenant, and can be hosted by a service provider or on-premises in the customer’s data center.
The scope of the Magic Quadrant for CIPS includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and integrated platform as a service (PaaS) offerings. These include application PaaS (aPaaS), functions as a service (FaaS), database PaaS (dbPaaS), application developer PaaS (adPaaS) and industrialized distributed cloud offerings that are often deployed in enterprise data centers.
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services
Source: Gartner (July 2021)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud (also known as Aliyun in Chinese) is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. This Magic Quadrant evaluation is focused on Alibaba Cloud’s international business, which is headquartered in Singapore, and our technical assessment was performed using the international service.
Alibaba Cloud is a good fit for cloud-first digital business workloads for customers that are based in China or Southeast Asia and wish to leverage Alibaba Cloud’s technology to support their ecosystem or need to locate cloud infrastructure in China. Alibaba Cloud is focused on expanding its successes in Asia in addition to advancing database PaaS offerings.
Strengths
Regional leadership: Alibaba Cloud continues to have a leadership position in China and surrounding countries in terms of market share and capabilities. The company is poised to be a favored regional provider in emerging cloud markets, such as those in Indonesia and Malaysia, given its local market understanding and ability to be a bridge to digital commerce.
Financial position: Alibaba Cloud experienced impressive revenue gains over the past year and has recently become marginally profitable for the first time. Alibaba’s go-to-market execution is driving steady growth in both China and Southeast Asia.
Digital channels: Enterprises often view Alibaba Cloud as a pathway to digital transformation and commerce capabilities. This is based on Alibaba Cloud’s big data and analytics capabilities and its parent company.
Cautions
Worldwide traction: Alibaba Cloud’s market share, though third worldwide, is mostly concentrated in China, and most of its customers are either headquartered in China or global businesses that need a local Chinese presence. The company has yet to have breakout success in markets outside of its home region and is unlikely to meaningfully penetrate such markets.
Regional competition: Alibaba is facing significant competitive pressure from both established worldwide providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, and China-focused cloud providers, such as Tencent Cloud and Huawei, which are all vying for a share of a growing market. Further, Alibaba Cloud is caught between geopolitical tension that may be a concern for international clients considering Alibaba Cloud’s offerings.
Transparency: Alibaba Cloud is not as transparent nor predictable with respect to discounting relative to international competitors. Alibaba also still lacks an element of transparency from the perspective of technical details of service implementations.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon, is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. AWS is focused on being a broad-based provider of IT services, ranging from cloud-native and edge to ERP and mission-critical workloads.
AWS’s future focus is on attempting to own increasingly larger portions of the supply chain used to deliver cloud services to customers. Its operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be early-stage startups to large enterprises.
Strengths
Engineering supply chain: AWS is using its engineering prowess to deeply innovate in areas such as AWS-designed CPUs that offer better price/performance relative to x86 counterparts for some workloads. Such investments in AWS-designed silicon give the company long-term supply chain and engineering advantages relative to all other providers in this market.
Large financial commitments: AWS continues to outperform the market with respect to the size and frequency of large financial commitments that enterprises make to use the platform, and the company’s continued market share leadership reflects as much.
Innovation leader: AWS often sets the pace in the market for innovation, which guides the roadmaps of other CIPS providers. As the innovation leader, AWS has materially more mind share across a broad range of personas and customer types than all other providers.
Cautions
Challenging renewals: Dozens of Gartner clients across multiple geographies have reported unexpected pressure from AWS sales, which has sharply accelerated over the past year, to increase annual spend commitments by 20% to renew existing contracts. Since these customers typically have significant dependence on the platform, they may feel as if they have limited recourse; however, the pressure to increase spend is not AWS’s policy and will be eliminated if the customer escalates.
Offering complexity: Discerning between the multitude of solutions, such as those related to containers, databases and data management, requires substantial technical skills in order to appreciate the differences between the offerings and make the appropriate choice. Many enterprises require third-party assistance as a result of the complexity.
Bare-bones offerings: AWS’s new services are often not ready for meaningful enterprise consumption for prolonged periods of time because these bare-bones offerings are matured in public. Further, the company’s leadership position in IaaS and dbPaaS creates a misleading halo effect for other offerings, such as AWS Outposts, which has experienced modest traction to date.
Google
Google is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is strong in nearly all use cases and is slowly improving its edge capabilities. Google continues to invest in being a broad-based provider of IaaS and PaaS by expanding its capabilities as well as the size and reach of its go-to-market operations. Its operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be startups to large enterprises.
Strengths
Revenue growth: GCP’s revenue growth over the past year was impressive, although it’s currently incurring losses. The company is winning business for its core competencies, such as data and analytics, but GCP is also gaining ground with traditional enterprise workloads such as SAP.
Growing enterprise mind share: GCP is making gains in terms of mind share with enterprises. The company has seen steadily increased adoption and lands at the top of survey results when infrastructure leaders are asked about strategic cloud provider selection in the next few years.
Innovation velocity: Google continues with impressive year-over-year improvements that see GCP close meaningful gaps with both AWS and Microsoft Azure in terms of CIPS capabilities and, in some cases, accelerate past them. For example, GCP has the most fully featured Kubernetes service of any provider in this market.
Cautions
Postsales satisfaction: Some Gartner clients have a poor experience dealing with GCP after committing to use the platform. Much of this stems from the rapid growth of GCP and the organizational immaturity that results.
Limited incentives: Google is currently attracting clients with aggressive pricing relative to its competition, but the discounting is likely to eventually taper off as the company continues to mature with respect to revenue and customers.
Financial losses: GCP is the only CIPS provider with significant market share that currently operates at a financial loss. Further, GCP’s success erodes Google’s overall healthy gross margins, and the cloud division is a minor part of the parent company’s overall revenue.
IBM
IBM is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. IBM Cloud’s operations are geographically diversified and mostly focused on lift-and-shift and extended enterprise use cases. Its clients tend to be large and midsize enterprises. IBM has an investment focus that includes hybrid cloud, regulated workloads and industry-focused cloud services.
Strengths
Corporate restructuring: IBM is embarking on a divestiture that will see its managed IT services business spun off into a company called Kyndryl so that IBM can focus on higher-margin businesses such as IBM Cloud. This may enable IBM to commit necessary resources to IBM Cloud engineering efforts to further advance the offerings.
Regulated industries: IBM Cloud is doubling down on regulated workloads and industries as a primary strategy. The company has a particularly long history serving clients with such complex challenges using high-touch approaches that some customers value.
Edge computing: IBM has innovative efforts in edge computing with highly visible deployments such as the Mayflower Autonomous Ship projecthighlighting a pragmatic mix of open-source frameworks and technologies bolstered by IBM Cloud Satellite and Edge Application Manager.
Cautions
Market share: IBM continues to trail the market in terms of both market share and capabilities. IBM has made noticeable year-over-year progress in terms of adding CIPS capabilities, but not at the rate that makes it competitive with its peers.
Competitive pressure: IBM was early to invest significant time and resources into a vertical strategy with an initial focus on financial services and telco providers. However, these efforts risk being overshadowed by more agile competitors with greater market share, capabilities and reference customers.
Legacy perception: Gartner clients view IBM as a provider of legacy technologies, and it is not often a consideration among shortlisted cloud providers as a result. Furthermore, some of IBM Cloud’s efforts to court software developers through open-source initiatives have yet to produce results.
Microsoft
Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Microsoft Azure is strong in all use cases, which include the extended cloud and edge computing. Azure is particularly well suited for Microsoft-centric organizations. Microsoft has an investment focus on making architectural improvements to the Azure platform and providing a broad range of enterprise-focused services. Its operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be midsize and large enterprises.
Strengths
Broadly appealing: Microsoft has the broadest sets of capabilities, covering a full range of enterprise IT needs from SaaS to PaaS and IaaS, compared to any provider in this market. From the perspective of IaaS and PaaS, Microsoft has compelling capabilities ranging from developer tooling such as Visual Studio and GitHub to public cloud services.
Enterprise relationships: Enterprises often choose Azure because of the trust in Microsoft built over many years. Such strategic alignment with Microsoft gives Azure advantages across nearly every vertical market.
Data services adoption: Microsoft Azure’s forays in operational databases and big data solutions have been markedly successful over the past year. Azure’s Cosmos DB and its joint offering with Databricks stand out in terms of customer adoption.
Cautions
Resiliency: Microsoft has made concerted efforts to improve resiliency with critical services such as Azure Active Directory, but many Gartner clients remain concerned about the real-world impacts when such critical services are unavailable. Further, Microsoft continues to react slowly to the rollout of AZs with the likelihood that some regions will never be equipped with such resiliency capabilities. Services such as the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) continue to experience some outages, particularly in association with updates and maintenance events.
Commercial complexity: Microsoft has very complex licensing and contracting, and a complex account management structure with uneven cloud skills in the field. Further, Microsoft sales pressures to grow overall account revenue prevent it from effectively deploying Azure to bring down a customer’s total Microsoft costs.
Novel innovations: Azure’s novel innovations in the market for IaaS and PaaS relative to its competitors over the past year were substantially less appealing. Additionally, despite Microsoft Azure’s beginnings as an application PaaS provider, Azure’s product execution and adoption in this segment have been rather mixed.
Oracle
Oracle is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is mainly focused on lift-and-shift, HPC and hybrid workloads, though OCI endeavors to have broad capabilities outside of Oracle-focused applications. Oracle is focused on expanding the worldwide geographies it serves with capabilities competitive to its more established peers.
Strengths
Market responsiveness: Oracle continues an impressive year-over-year pace of innovation that brings it closer to the market leaders in terms of hyperscale cloud capabilities. Though Oracle is starting from a smaller base, OCI has added more capabilities on a percentage basis over the past year than any other provider in this market.
Critical infrastructure: OCI now serves as the underlying cloud infrastructure for all of Oracle’s PaaS and SaaS offerings, which demonstrates Oracle’s commitment to the market and its bet on OCI.
Distributed cloud: Oracle’s strategy of providing distributed cloud capabilities is unique compared to all other providers in this market. Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer allows enterprises to deploy a private cloud region on-premises with full parity of the public OCI regions and may be operated disconnected from the internet.
Cautions
Nascent adoption: Oracle’s rapid pace of engineering over the past two years means that many of its capabilities are new and immature. Due to the composition of the OCI customer base, cloud-native capabilities are less likely to have been deeply exercised or widely adopted.
Polarizing presence: Oracle remains a polarizing presence particularly among software developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) who do not view the company as a neutral provider. The negative sentiment with respect to Oracle prevents the company from having the same level of grassroots success and enthusiasm of the larger, more successful providers.
Lift-and-shift focus: Most Gartner clients consider OCI mainly for lift and shift of Oracle-centric workloads rather than as a general-purpose provider for all workloads, despite OCI being capable of such. However, customers often expand their use cases over time, which raises the likelihood of exposing missing features and the deficiencies of OCI’s limited ecosystem.
Tencent Cloud
Tencent Cloud is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Tencent Cloud is mainly focused on China, serving multinationals in China or Chinese multinationals expanding overseas. Tencent is investing in network capabilities to support the low latencies required for gaming workloads.
Strengths
Digital transformation: Tencent Cloud is leveraging strengths in areas of social networking, digital marketing and gaming to enable digital transformation for companies delivering services in China.
Large deployments: Tencent Cloud has established impactful hybrid-cloud deployments by supporting top financial services clients in China. Besides cloud-native technology, clients appreciate Tencent Cloud’s ability to integrate existing infrastructure as long as it meets approved criteria.
Investments: Tencent has the ability to invest billions of dollars in a wide spectrum, ranging from IaaS to artificial intelligence (AI) to distributed cloud. Tencent Cloud is also distinguished by being the only hyperscale cloud provider with a region in Russia and core infrastructure capabilities (compute, storage and networking), particularly networking.
Cautions
International presence: One-third of Tencent’s regions outside of mainland China are operated by a partner. Additionally, two-thirds of Tencent’s total regions have only one availability zone.
Regional disparity: Notable gaps exist between Tencent’s China-focused regions and its international ones. Many key features are not available in the international regions, such as DevOps tooling and edge computing capabilities. Further, certain security services, such as its web application firewall service, are only available in its Hong Kong region.
Narrow ecosystem: Tencent Cloud has a developing ecosystem of managed service providers that are often required by enterprises to deliver professional services in order to adopt CIPS offerings. This is particularly true outside of China where Tencent Cloud has yet to establish relationships with the largest managed service providers (MSPs).
Vendors Added and Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
Added
No vendors were added.
Dropped
No vendors were dropped.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
For Gartner clients, Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities research identifies and then analyses the most relevant providers and their products in a market. Gartner uses by default an upper limit of 20 providers to support the identification of the most relevant providers in a market. On some specific occasions, the upper limit may be extended by Methodologies where the intended research value to our clients might otherwise be diminished. The inclusion criteria represent the specific attributes that analysts believe are necessary for inclusion in this research.
To qualify for inclusion, providers need the following.
Market participation. Providers must sell public cloud IaaS as a stand-alone service, without the requirement to use any managed services (including guest OS management) or to bundle it with managed hosting, application development, application maintenance or other forms of outsourcing. They may, optionally, also sell a private or hybrid offering that uses the same architecture but is single-tenant.
Market traction and momentum. Providers must be among the top global providers for the relevant segments (public and industrialized private cloud infrastructure and platform services, excluding small deployments of two or fewer virtual machines [VMs]). They must have ISO 27001-audited (or equivalent) data centers on at least three continents.
They must have at least one public cloud IaaS offering that meets the following criteria:
If the offering has been generally available for more than three years: A minimum of $1 billion in 2020 public cloud IaaS and PaaS (CIPS) revenue (excluding partner-operated and/or distributed/hybrid/private cloud infrastructure deployed outside of a cloud provider’s data centers), excluding all managed and professional services. Additionally, $250 mm of the CIPS contract revenue must come from outside of the country where greater than 50% of data centers are located.
If the offering has been generally available for less than three years: A minimum of $500 million in 2020 revenue, excluding all managed and professional services, as well as a growth rate of at least 50% exiting 2020.
Gartner required vendors to provide a written confirmation of achievement of the following requirements. The confirmation needed to be from an appropriate finance executive within their organization.
Business capabilities relevant to Gartner clients. Vendors must offer public cloud IaaS services globally (they must be purchasable outside their home region); be able to invoice and offer consolidated billing; and be willing to negotiate customized contracts. They must have 24/7 customer support (including phone support). There must be an option for English-language localization of the contract, service portal, documentation and support.
Technical capabilities relevant to Gartner clients. Vendors must have public cloud IaaS and PaaS services that are suitable for supporting mission-critical, large-scale production workloads, whether enterprise or cloud-native. Specific generally available, first-party service features must include:
Software-defined compute, storage and networking, with access to a web services API for these capabilities
Cloud software infrastructure services facilitating automated management, including, at a minimum, monitoring and autoscaling
A managed database platform as a service offering
A managed functions as a service offering with integrated HTTP API gateway platform whose underlying infrastructure is not exposed to the user
Company developed, publicly available SDKs in three or more programming languages
A distributed, continuously available control plane supporting a hyperscale architecture
CI/CD offerings to support the complete application life cycle including automated build and deployments
A distributed cloud offering as defined by Gartner
Real-time provisioning for compute instances (small Linux VM in 5 minutes, 1,000 Linux VMs in 1 hour) and a container service that can provision Docker containers in seconds
An allowable VM size of at least 16 vCPUs and 128 GB of RAM
A service-level agreement for compute, with a minimum of 99.9% availability
The ability to securely extend the customer’s data center network into the cloud environment
The ability to support multiple users and API keys, with role-based access control
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria
Weighting
Product or Service
High
Overall Viability
High
Sales Execution/Pricing
Medium
Market Responsiveness/Record
High
Marketing Execution
Medium
Customer Experience
Medium
Operations
Medium
Source: Gartner (July 2021)
Completeness of Vision
Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria
Weighting
Market Understanding
High
Marketing Strategy
Medium
Sales Strategy
Medium
Offering (Product) Strategy
High
Business Model
Medium
Vertical/Industry Strategy
Low
Innovation
High
Geographic Strategy
Low
Source: Gartner (July 2021)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders distinguish themselves by offering a service suitable for strategic adoption and having an ambitious roadmap. They can serve a broad range of use cases, although they do not excel in all areas, may not necessarily be the best providers for a specific need and may not serve some use cases at all. Leaders in this market have appreciable market share and many referenceable customers.
Challengers
Challengers are well-positioned to serve some current market needs. They deliver a good service that is targeted at a particular set of use cases, and they have a track record of successful delivery. However, they are not adapting to market challenges sufficiently quickly or do not have a broad scope of ambition.
Visionaries
Visionaries have an ambitious vision of the future and are making significant investments in the development of unique technologies. Their services are still emerging, and they have many capabilities in development that are not yet generally available. Although they may have many customers, they might not yet serve a broad range of use cases well or may have a limited geographic scope.
Niche Players
The Niche Players in the market for CIPS may be excellent providers for particular use cases or in regions in which they operate, but they should ultimately be viewed as specialist providers. They often do not serve a broad range of use cases well or have a broadly ambitious roadmap. Some may have solid leadership positions in markets adjacent to this market, but have developed only limited CIPS capabilities.
Context
On the surface, many of the providers in this Magic Quadrant appear alike. They all have, for example, virtual machines, managed container services and managed database PaaS offerings. The various pricing models are remarkably similar and often within comparable ranges, even when negotiated discounts are taken into account.
What’s wholly different is below the surface — at the level of architecture, implementation and operations. The resiliency characteristics afforded to clients varies widely by provider. Major outages plagued several cloud providers in this Magic Quadrant over the past year. In some cases, providers offered few capabilities to work around provider-oriented failure using accepted, modern means such as availability zones.
Strategic cloud provider selection necessitates that enterprises consider the failure scenarios by workload and architect to manage them. In some regions, with several providers in this Magic Quadrant, the challenge of working around provider-oriented failure is insurmountable.
Market Overview
The market for cloud infrastructure and platform services is consolidating, with over 90% of the worldwide market concentrated in just four cloud providers. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft lead the market with Alibaba and Google as the next closest competitors.
This consolidation shows no sign of slowing down. AWS and Microsoft continue to dominate in much of North America and Europe, where overall cloud growth rates remain strong. Alibaba is a dominant force in China and a formidable competitor in countries where China has influence.
However, the era of the Chinese service provider is just beginning. Providers such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, Huawei and Kingsoft are showing keen interest in competing, not just regionally within Asia but also in far-from-home regions such as Latin America, where the Chinese providers face a less hostile reception than in the Western world.
The worldwide consolidation is occurring largely as a result of enterprises seeking industrialized offerings that bring with them a level of dependability and a wide breadth of functionality to satisfy all enterprise workloads.
This is the key difference between a worldwide provider and a boutique regional provider that may have a virtualized offering consisting of compute, network and storage using off-the-shelf virtualization products. The boutique provider is simply unable to compete with the innovation speed of the worldwide providers.
Evaluation Criteria Definitions
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.
Ingin tahu implementasi Artificial Internet of Things (AIoT) untuk Smart Home Anda, silahkan gabung dalam kegiatan webinar EVENTCERDAS, didukung oleh APTIKNAS dan IAIS.
"EZVIZ Smarthome & Potensi Market di era digital"
📅 12 Agustus 2021
🕑 14-16 WIB
🗣️ Taufik Munandar Abie - Business Development Manager EZVIZ
beta version of PHPRunner and ASPRunner.NET 10.6 is here! (ASPRunnerPro 10.6 will be available soon).
Please note this is a beta version and not ready to be used in production yet. If you purchased PHPRunner or ASPRunner.NET less than one year ago, you can download the registered version via your control panel. If you purchased more than one year ago you can also see upgrade links in the control panel.
A complete list of new features and trial version download links are available in this blog post.
Other news We almost finished a new HelpDesk template, you can expect to see it the next week. Also, a new version of the Chat template with group chat functionality will be available in a few days.
The sales force automation market grew 10.9% to an estimated $8.15 billion in 2020. Vendors improved guided selling, activity management and overall platform capabilities. Our evaluation of 16 vendors will help application leaders choose the solution that best meets their sales execution needs.
Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines sales force automation (SFA) as systems that support the automation of sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for organizations’ sales professionals. Gartner considers SFA to be foundational technology, implemented to automate an organization’s core sales processes.
The core capabilities of SFA systems include:
Lead, account, contact and opportunity management
Sales activity management
Guided selling
Sales pipeline and forecast management
Mobile sales applications
Reporting
Partner relationship management (PRM)
Platform capabilities
Optional capabilities include:
Digital content management for sales
Configure, price and quote (CPQ)
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation
Source: Gartner (August 2021)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Creatio
Creatio returns as a Leader in this Magic Quadrant on the basis of product capabilities and innovation. Its SFA product, Sales Creatio, is best suited to midsize and large enterprises ranging from 200 employees to more than 2,500 employees. It also supports complex global deployments. Sales Creatio can support a wide range of sales processes due to its low-code/no-code platform abilities and business process management (BPM) engine. Most notably, Creatio’s product releases include low-code AI models for next best action and out-of-the-box AI for contact and account recommendations. The vendor’s roadmap includes a focus on digital selling experiences, such as providing omnichannel connectors and augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) integration with mobile.
Strengths
Artificial intelligence: Creatio has released notable capabilities to support out-of-the-box AI functionality. These include the ability for users to use preconfigured machine learning (ML) models to score any object in the application for use in predictive analytics and AI conversational analytics.
Innovation: Over the past year, Creatio has delivered meaningful product innovation to support multiexperience selling such as AR/VR integration, omnichannel connectors and sales cadences.
Market responsiveness: Creatio has delivered a comparatively high number of product enhancements that have arisen from customer requests. These afford sales organizations the ability to influence continuous improvements to their sales capabilities and roadmaps.
Cautions
Sales strategy: Compared with Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, Creatio does not target small businesses, and does not distinguish between its approach to selling to midsize clients and enterprise clients. This is important for sales organizations to understand, as it can have implications for the various needs of these different market segments.
Forecasting functionality: Sales organizations requiring the ability to do complex sales forecasting may find Creatio’s solution difficult to use. It demands a high degree of manual dexterity in order to work with calculations and manipulate forecasts inside the existing application.
Application ecosystem: Creatio has very few sales-specific applications when compared with other Leaders. It has approximately 187 sales-compatible apps built by independent software vendors (ISVs), of which 70 are sales specific.
CRMNEXT
CRMNEXT returns as a Challenger. Its SFA product is aimed at all sizes of enterprises in financial services, insurance and life sciences, but has a particular forte for meeting very large enterprise needs. CRMNEXT is best suited for complex B2C relationships, but also supports B2B and indirect channel sales. Over the past year, the company has invested considerably to support digital selling environments such as AI models for smart work prioritization, real-time nudges and alerts, and an advanced playbook designer. CRMNEXT’s roadmap includes advancing its AI priorities, such as releasing out-of-the-box, industry-specific prediction models.
Strengths
Pipeline management: CRMNEXT’s Catalyst Performance Modeler, which is part of its SFA offering, is an effective sales planning and forecasting tool. Its intelligent algorithms take past performance and current run rates into account to create strategies for meeting targets. CRMNEXT can support a high degree of sales process complexity, with AI and ML models with no code required.
Reporting: CRMNEXT comes with “what if” analysis capabilities, which allow for moving opportunities between quarters to switch among different sales quota scenarios. Customers value this flexibility for pipeline management and forecasting.
Functionalities: CRMNEXT provides drag-and-drop capabilities to create processes and workflows, and processing to core systems. Customers can leverage automation to reduce account opening time, deliver expedient product fulfillment and eliminate manual tasks. Guided next-best-action prompts and call scripts support efficiency.
Cautions
Lack of services: Clients have reported to Gartner CRMNEXT’s lack of continued assignment of professional services, and also delayed technical support for their projects. CRMNEXT experts were either not available or delayed significantly in delivering requested support to customers. In some cases, the vendor delivered support via nonexperts, which deferred customer projects significantly.
Limited ISVs: CRMNEXT does not provide a marketplace for filling in, complementing or extending its own functionalities. Customers need to know that they cannot adopt complementary applications, add-ons or extensions through a marketplace.
Limited industries: CRMNEXT is well-established in financial services, banking, insurances and life-science industries, but has limited visibility in other sectors. Customers outside of these industries need to carefully assess CRMNEXT’s vision and strategy to test its adaptability for their purpose.
Freshworks
Freshworks remains a Niche Player. Its product, Freshworks CRM (formerly Freshsales), is primarily aimed at organizations with 50 to 500+ employees. SFA capabilities include account and contact management, opportunity management, pipeline and forecast management, and reporting. Freshworks CRM has deployments worldwide. It is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. Organizations will find the product suitable for basic to moderately complex sales processes. Notable improvements to Freshworks CRM include touchless creation of leads or contacts from email, chatbot support for customers and sellers, new forecast and quota management functionality, and voice data entry.
Strengths
Product strategy: Freshworks has broadened its range of native SFA functions in response to customer needs by adding contact health scoring, forecast management and voice data entry. It has also integrated Freshworks CRM with Freshservice and the Neo reporting platform to offer users a unified customer view. Furthermore, the acquisition of customer success management vendor Natero will help with postsale customer success and 360-degree visibility.
Sales execution: In 2020, Freshworks had among the highest customer acquisition rates of all evaluated vendors. This is important for sales organizations to consider as the vendor increases its brand awareness and global reach.
Market responsiveness: Freshworks has delivered quality enhancements in the last year, including a new reporting platform, a CPQ engine, a forecasting module and lead generation chatbots. It has also delivered frequent updates, averaging more than one release per month.
Cautions
Forecasting: Compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Freshworks’ forecasting functionality is only included in the highest edition of the product package, not as a core feature of the SFA solution unanimously. Furthermore, it also lacks the scope and depth possessed by leading vendor solutions, such as the ability to create custom forecast categories and assigning quotas on a product basis.
Product functionality: Freshworks’ account, contact and opportunity management features are limited compared with other vendors, and best suited for less-complex sales processes. In particular, in terms of its ability to manage account hierarchies, integrate with third-party data services, and maintain contact relationships and relationship intelligence, Freshworks does not perform as well as other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
Retention: Freshworks encountered a relatively high level of customer churn in 2020, relative to other vendors in the Magic Quadrant. This is a consideration for sales organizations that want to prioritize a vendor with a longer tenure of customers.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a new entrant to this Magic Quadrant and is a Niche Player. HubSpot provides CRM applications spanning marketing, sales and customer services. Its SFA product is called Sales Hub. HubSpot sells mainly to small and midsize organizations in the U.S., followed by EMEA, Asia/Pacific and LATAM. Sales Hub is delivered as a SaaS product and is hosted over AWS in the U.S. and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in Europe. In the past 12 months, HubSpot has released account-based marketing (ABM) features for sales, improved its cadence tracking functionalities and has added a new forecasting tool. HubSpot’s roadmap includes conversational intelligence, customization features and adding a sandbox testing environment.
Strengths
Appealing user interface (UI): Sales Hub comes with a straightforward, easy-to-learn UI. The interface is designed for intuitive navigation, allowing sales users to perform tasks efficiently, but is also able to review multiple data points easily.
Marketing in sales: Sales Hub informs sales reps if a customer has opened emails, or has visited or submitted forms on HubSpot-hosted websites, and views or shares sales collateral uploaded via HubSpot. This functionality is normally only seen in marketing technologies, but highly appreciated by sales for managing better customer engagement.
Customer service:HubSpot provides 24/7 customer support by live chat or email. Customers on HubSpot’s Professional or Enterprise license also have access to help desks over the phone.
Cautions
Data synchronization: Accounts created by HubSpot based on domains and contacts are based on email only, and cannot be extended by other values. This makes it difficult for customers to identify duplicate accounts and contacts.
Lacking customization options: Sales Hub comes with limited possibilities for customization. B2B customers with particular, lengthy and complex sales cycles need to assess HubSpot’s customization options.
Market understanding: HubSpot’s value proposition hinges on a unified HubSpot experience. Customers operating in a mature sales technology environment might expect Sales Hub to be easy to integrate into their complex environment with non-HubSpot technologies, which is not pronounced by the vendor. HubSpot differentiators are based on delivering a native application ecosystem, progressive pricing and a strong ecosystem. But customers expecting to hear about capabilities distinguishable from other SFA vendors might be disappointed.
Insightly
Insightly remains a Niche Player. Insightly CRM includes capabilities for sales, lead management, project management and custom process design in a single SaaS offering. Insightly CRM is aimed at small and midsize B2B sales organizations, particularly those in the professional services sector. Insightly targets customers primarily in North America and Europe. In the past year, it has introduced AppConnect, allowing customers to integrate Insightly CRM with other enterprise applications. Automated quote generation has also been added. Notable planned improvements include AI-based lead scoring and campaign attribution analysis.
Strengths
Product offering: Insightly’s lead management, reporting capabilities and integration features are well-aligned with the needs of small and midsize selling organizations. Full audit logging of data changes enables users to draw more insight from opportunity and activity records.
Sales execution: Insightly’s customer acquisition was among the highest of all vendors evaluated, achieving double-digit growth over the prior year. This is a positive indicator for sales organizations looking for an SFA vendor that has a relatively stable product presence among its target customer segments.
Customer loyalty: Insightly has built a higher customer retention than other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, especially among customers who prioritize the ability to manage postsales delivery projects.
Cautions
Market understanding: Insightly’s value proposition is based in large part on providing project management features, which does not resonate with customers in all industries, especially in sales organizations. Its vision for digital optimization is limited to data integration and reporting, which is not a core depiction of digital optimization requirements.
Implementation and onboarding: The scope of implementation services offered by Insightly is comparatively low. It has few active implementation partners, a small professional services team, and basic account configuration and data migration services. Insightly’s scope of client training, onboarding and customer success management is narrow compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
Innovation: Insightly’s roadmap is largely unchanged since last year, focused on AI-based lead scoring and campaign attribution analysis. Its roadmap currently does not include the addition of guided selling and forecasting features that many customers seek.
Microsoft
Microsoft returns as a Leader. This is based on a strong product vision for digital selling and its recent product releases. Its product, Dynamics 365 Sales, is relevant for all industries and organizations of all sizes. Recent enhancements to the product portfolio include conversational intelligence for desktop, sales acceleration and advanced predictive forecasting functions. The vendor’s roadmap includes support for seamless digital selling experiences that enhance collaboration through Microsoft Teams and other web chat experiences. Microsoft plans to add a CPQ solution to support digital commerce and seller-based quote-to-cash execution, with a public preview in 2021.
Strengths
Market understanding: Microsoft has consistently improved its roadmap to support modern sales strategies, which include the increasing need for collaboration and remote selling, all the while not losing its focus on field-based sales. Examples include Dynamics 365-to-Teams integration for collaboration and plans to embed conversational intelligence into mobile, which will help with sales effectiveness. This plays well with sales organizations looking for a simpler user experience inside the SFA solution.
Sales strategy: Microsoft has a strong sales strategy for supporting digital transformation efforts, which is often business-value led and not just focused on supporting sales outcomes. For example, it has introduced the ability to provide industry-specific assessments and benchmarks, and to use these to showcase how its Dynamics 365 Sales solution can help deliver results.
Product strategy: Microsoft continues to release new AI-based products and features, namely with the release of conversational intelligence. This includes sentiment analysis and relationship analytics to measure contact health and engagement. It has also included most of the AI capabilities in a single product edition — Dynamics 365 Sales Premium — and at a reasonable list price of $135 per user per month.
Cautions
Industry strategy: Microsoft currently relies on partners to deliver its industry strategy, and customers may encounter a number of overlapping partner solutions, especially within sales. This could falsely signal to customers and prospects that Microsoft underinvests in an existing native product offering or in its industry accelerators and solutions. Also, Microsoft’s AppSource marketplace has a vast amount of accelerators and apps for industries, but these often overlap with partners like C3 AI and Adobe.
Sales execution: Microsoft continues to heavily rely on partners and resellers, and has an underdeveloped direct sales organization. This can have a direct impact on its Ability to Execute effectively relative to other Leaders.
Market responsiveness: Microsoft’s product releases often play catch-up with those of other leading vendors in this space, and it rarely puts forth truly differentiating features. For example, Microsoft Teams integration with the SFA product was made available simultaneously to most of the remaining Leaders. Another example is the vendor’s planned release of a CPQ solution, which is already present in leading vendor solutions for quote-to-cash processes.
Neocrm
Neocrm (formerly Xiaoshouyi), a subsidiary of IngageApp Global, is a Niche Player. It has rebranded the product to prepare for internationalization, but its product, Neocrm Sales Cloud, continues to focus on China-based companies. It is best suited for B2B and B2C sales processes. Neocrm serves the manufacturing, high tech, professional services and consumer products industries. In the last year, it has added the ability to connect with end users on the WeChat social platform, capture leads and convert to contacts, customers and opportunities, generate quotes and orders, and view built-in and custom visual workbooks. Neocrm plans to continue to build out its ML capabilities with NeoSuggest and NeoPredict.
Strengths
Market understanding: Neocrm has incorporated a “lead to cash” concept focused on automating manufacturing, channel partners and consumer transactions in its platform as a service.
Integration: Low code/no code allows Neocrm to easily connect WeChat into the solution’s SFA capabilities and execute lead capture and pricing and quotes.
Product: Neocrm has native mobile and social capabilities that connect internal and external sales users with customers, making work easier. This will be valuable in China.
Cautions
Geographic strategy: Neocrm’s customer base is almost completely in China, reducing its ability to serve customers in other locations.
Market strategy: Over the last three years, Neocrm has made several name changes. The confusion over its identity dilutes its brand message, causing uncertainty for potential customers.
Native CRM capabilities: Neocrm sells some core SFA functionality as add-ons, functions that leading vendors offer natively in their respective applications without additional cost, such as opportunity forecasting and guided selling functions.
Oracle
Oracle returns as a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Part of the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) suite, Oracle Sales is broadly focused on the core components of SFA, but also on adjacent areas such as sales performance management (SPM), planning and data intelligence solutions for sales. Oracle’s operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be midmarket to enterprise. It also sells prepackaged SFA industry applications, as seen among some Leaders. Oracle has incorporated its new Redwood design for a streamlined UX and UI, which is responsive and modern, making seller work easier. It has also added an Oracle Sales Assistant and Microsoft Teams integration to collaborate and take actions.
Strengths
Market understanding: Oracle offers a unified enterprise offering that includes ERP, CRM, platform and business intelligence capabilities. Its responsive design within Oracle Sales provides a unified experience for the seller that creates an environment for productivity and efficiency.
Product packaging: Oracle has added AI features to the Enterprise and Premium subscriptions of Oracle Sales at no additional cost, and without the need for separate subscriptions. This simplifies the contracting process for buyers.
Innovation: Oracle has added innovative capabilities that include Slack and Microsoft Teams integration for collaboration. It has improved its mobile capabilities with adaptive search and responsive design, and workspace-driven infolets, which are configurable mini-workspaces to help get tasks done more efficiently. Oracle has also included a unified quoting experience integrating CPQ as a part of sales.
Cautions
Marketing strategy: Oracle has a relatively low number of mentions on shortlists of Gartner client inquiries for the SFA product compared with some other Leaders. The vendor has struggled to position its SFA product line in the market to increase penetration.
Integration: Oracle provides seamless integration with other Oracle clouds and applications, either out of the box or through its Oracle Integration Cloud Services (OICS). However, integrations with non-Oracle products become more difficult for end users to implement.
Lead management: Oracle lacks depth in some capabilities for lead management that some Leaders possess. For example, web-to-lead form capability in the lead management function is primarily executed through its B2B marketing platform or through a PaaS extension. Meanwhile, most SFA vendors have these capabilities as a standard functionality of their SFA solutions.
Pega
Pega remains a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. It delivers on a composable architecture with prepackaged business capabilities, delivering a unified CRM. Pega Sales Automation supports B2C, indirect sales and B2B sales teams. The solution’s delivery mode is mostly SaaS-based (95% of its customers are via AWS), but also on-premises (5%). Pega offers geographically segmented data residency under its Pega Cloud Services offering. In the past year, it has focused on enhancing the client experience, customer success and attracting partners in new verticals. Pega’s roadmap includes many new features to strengthen its vision of AI-powered intelligent sales automation for supporting sales’ changing roles.
Strengths
AI everywhere: Pega is focusing on automating the sales process, supporting the sellers’ tasks and providing insights to users and customers through its comprehensive AI-based embedded technologies. Customers seeking more automation for their sales processes should assess Pega’s guided selling capabilities, its BPM and RPA functionalities, NLP and ML.
Integration ease: Pega provides low-code architecture to make it easier to integrate with third-party applications. This is of particular interest to customers seeking to create a seamless sales technology environment by integrating many different sales tools.
New UI/UX: Cosmos, Pega’s new templated enterprise application design for process workflow and management, allows for reviewing sales activity workloads more efficiently. It allows for seeing all information in one place, with customizable categories, and it works on any device. Customers wanting to steer each opportunity to the full life cycle will find these capabilities helpful.
Cautions
Complex platform: Customers report that implementing Pega’s platform can be complex. Understanding the platform architecture and shifting data can take time. Prospective customers evaluating Pega should focus on understanding Pega’s architecture.
Pega resources: Finding Pega implementation partners is relatively difficult compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, as commonly reported by Gartner customers. Customers wanting to deploy Pega should secure professional support and resources before they finalize an organizational deployment plan.
Industry coverage: Pega is currently recognized as best suited for the insurance, financial services and healthcare industries, with less presence in other sectors. Customers outside of these three common Pega industries should test Pega against their primary organizational processes to ensure it fits their purpose.
Pipeliner
Pipeliner remains a Niche Player. Pipeliner is most often used in North America. Its SFA product, Pipeliner CRM, is best suited to small and midsize B2B sales organizations and has also been implemented in large sales organizations. The product provides a well-developed mobile app and web browser UI. In the past year, Pipeliner has added several new capabilities for evaluating performance of pipelines, a workflow automation engine called Automatizer and customizing dashboards. In the coming year, Pipeliner plans to introduce customizable compact pipeline views and team evaluation benchmarking to enhance manager inspection and coaching. Account planning features are also on its upcoming roadmap.
Strengths
Sales strategy for small businesses: Pipeliner continues to demonstrate a strong strategy for selling to small businesses. It has a dedicated inbound sales team and uses independent full-time and part-time sellers, although it can support midsize and large enterprises. It maintains a sales thought leadership site, which is helpful for companies looking to quickly implement sales best practices using Pipeliner CRM.
Market responsiveness: Pipeliner has delivered quality enhancements in the last year, including email personalization updates, customizable form views, import templates and improvements to the Automatizer workflow engine. It has delivered frequent updates, averaging almost one release per month over the course of the year.
Platform: Pipeliner has improved its platform automation abilities with the release of Automatizer, a platform for in-app workflow execution. Creating workflow automation is done via drag and drop design inside the day-to-day UI, thus allowing sales users to automate their workflow without the involvement of an administrator or IT. This bodes well for sales organizations looking to provide autonomy to sales users and have sales reps self-impose efficiency improvements.
Cautions
Product offering: Pipeliner lacks the depth of core capabilities offered by Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, including advanced forecast management, PRM, application customization options, and a mobile software development kit (SDK). These are all considerations for companies seeking the full breadth of capabilities from their SFA provider.
Support for complex implementations: Pipeliner has a limited number of professional service resources and a comparatively modest number of implementation partners. It also has a comparatively modest investment in customer success employees. These are considerations for companies seeking help with either sales transformation projects or with improving adoption.
Product pricing: Pipeliner has increased list prices on the highest edition of its Pipeliner CRM product by 35% in the last year. This is a consideration for sales organizations looking for stability in pricing from their prospective vendor solution.
Salesforce
Salesforce returns as a Leader in this Magic Quadrant, based on its increasing market responsiveness. Its SFA product, Salesforce Sales Cloud, is suitable for organizations of all sizes in locations worldwide, and can support deployments of 50 employees to well over 5,000 employees. The solution now includes digital selling and remote collaboration capabilities integrated with Microsoft Teams, and allows for deeper collaboration through Salesforce Anywhere. In the past year, the vendor has released Einstein Conversation Insights, a conversational intelligence platform that is coupled with Salesforce High Velocity Sales, an inside sales product, and Salesforce Meetings, a video meeting management system. Planned innovations include more flexible forecasting models, a High Velocity Sales integration with LinkedIn to support cadences, and a Slack for Sales integration.
Strengths
Sales execution and viability: Despite the pandemic and a difficult economic climate, Salesforce grew its client base and product portfolio, thus reporting companywide, double-digit growth year over year.
Market understanding: Salesforce’s value proposition and differentiators rest on the fact that it has a solid understanding of the future needs of selling organizations. Some notable examples include a tightly integrated Revenue Cloud product with multirevenue model support (from consumption pricing to subscription billing), over 10 prepackaged industry-specific sales applications, and best practices according to industry.
Market responsiveness: Salesforce received high marks for the quality of its product enhancements when compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. For example, it released Global AI Models for organizations looking to take advantage of AI but lacking quality data to start. This is important because poor data quality plagues sales organizations and inhibits AI adoption. Other examples include multicloud support for billing, and Sales Cloud-Microsoft Teams integration.
Cautions
Product features: As of July 2020, Salesforce discontinued the Einstein Voice Assistant service, which had previously been a key feature in its sales mobile application offering. Salesforce no longer has voice-to-text application execution, such as creating opportunities from a mobile device, which plays a significant role for field sales.
Offering strategy: Due to recent acquisitions and an increasing focus on industry-based product offerings, Salesforce has a relatively confusing sales product strategy. For example, you can find the Sales Cloud offering in over 10 package variations when considering editions, ranging from Sales Cloud stand-alone, a combined Sales+Service Cloud offering, and an industry-based Sales Cloud offering. This can get overwhelming for sales organizations trying to navigate product packaging needs.
Innovation change: Compared with other Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, Salesforce has delivered a modest amount of net new innovation in its sales product suite this year. For example, most sales releases for this year were enhancements of a prior year’s sales product.
SAP
SAP returns as a Leader. SAP Sales Cloud is one of five core modules in the SaaS-based Experience Management product portfolio (the other modules being SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Digital Commerce, SAP Service Cloud, and SAP Customer Data Cloud). SAP Sales Cloud includes CPQ functionalities and SPM features. The solution is deployed in over 31 industries and is commonly used by manufacturing, professional services and consumer packaged goods organizations. In the past 12 months, SAP has introduced new activity types for guided selling, ordering and filtering of products, inside sales enhancements, and custom attributes from SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA in offline pricing. SAP’s roadmap includes predictive forecasting, enhanced guided selling and dynamic visit planning.
Strengths
Functionalities: SAP comes with a well-structured UI, allowing for simplified management of the functionalities. Its data visibility aids account hierarchy functionalities in mapping complex organizational structures, with multiple levels of subsidiaries or distribution centers. SAP regularly updates these functionalities.
Data compliance: SAP provides an EU Access service, which enables customers to have their data processed and accessed from within the European Union, European Economic Area and Switzerland, apart from other regional access services. Remote access outside the region is excluded. SAP Sales Cloud can also be hosted in data centers in China and Russia, compliant with local data residency requirements.
Customer service: SAP Sales Cloud comes with 24/7 service and support independently of the contractual framework chosen. SAP ONE provides unified global access to all support inquiries in a mobile-enabled interface. It is connected to SAP’s Enterprise Support Academy for improving user adoption by offering expert chats, access to support engineers and guided answers for self-service.
Cautions
Sales execution: SAP sells mostly to its existing ERP customers, which seek to complement their ERP applications with SAP’s cloud-based CRM technologies. SAP is not particularly strong in communicating its roadmap, nor is it a standout in the market for winning new business.
Differentiation: SAP’s SFA capabilities are less differentiated in innovation and lag other Leaders in this evaluation. Prospective customers looking to differentiate their sales technology stack efforts will not find, for example, functionalities such as being able to augment standard reports with calculations.
Product and sales strategy: SAP Sales Cloud does not come as a freemium offering, but customers can request a trial period. Customers wanting to test SAP Sales Cloud in their own environment will require system integration support for setting up the environment. Customers frequently report that the installation is a big task.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM remains a Visionary in this year’s Magic Quadrant. Its SFA solution, Sugar Sell, is best suited to organizations with 50 to 500+ employees, but it can also support as many as 5,000 employees. In the last year, SugarCRM has acquired Node.io, in order to bring in additional predictive capabilities, as well as W-Systems, an implementation service provider, to help bolster its in-house professional services. The most notable releases of the past year are SugarPredict AI lead and opportunity scoring, and a purchase tracking module for postsale customer success. On its roadmap, SugarCRM plans to introduce SugarLive, an inbound and outbound telephony integration with AWS, sentiment analysis and an advanced CPQ solution.
Strengths
Market strategy: SugarCRM has an improved strategy for addressing the needs of its customer segment, and for customer retention. It currently has regionally tailored programs and a community to help with platform success. Furthermore, it has acquired W-Systems to increase professional resources and Node.io to address AI platform needs.
Product packaging and pricing: SugarCRM has among the most attractive product packaging and pricing for its sales solution. For example, its SFA product, Sugar Sell, lists at $80 per user per month and includes the SugarPredict AI offering for sales predictive analytics, as well as ample data storage needs and a full copy production sandbox. This bodes well for budget-conscious sales organizations and those seeking transparency.
Geographic strategy: SugarCRM has a global list of implementation partners to support deployments in any region, and the ability to deploy cloud (public or private), on-premises or hybrid environments. Also, SugarCloud is deployed on AWS infrastructure as a service, which helps for regional considerations.
Cautions
Product feature integration: SugarCRM has made minimal improvements to extend its acquired products into the Sugar Sell application. For example, even basic lead management functionality and processes have to be created from the Sugar Market application separately and not as embedded functionality into the sales application. Also, it lacks a native sales playbook designer as it currently uses Customer Journey, a plug-in from Addoptify, which requires a paid download.
Market responsiveness: Compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, SugarCRM has among the fewest number of enhancement requests arising directly from customers.
Innovation: SugarCRM has among the lowest percentage of company research and development expenses attributed to SFA innovation relative to most vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
Vtiger
Vtiger is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, also named Vtiger, is best suited to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with between 20 and 250 employees, and is relevant for B2B and B2C use cases. It is available globally with a strong base in North America. In the last year, Vtiger introduced Calculus AI, its ML algorithm, to provide sales insights. It also increased the depth of its WhatsApp features by allowing conversations and activities within the widget. For 2021, Vtiger has introduced a free pilot edition that allows SMB users to access sales enablement, marketing and project management features, to name a few. It plans to continue to enhance integrations to improve seller productivity, including into applications such as Zoom, ZoomInfo and Microsoft Teams.
Strengths
Geographic strategy: Vtiger has a broad distribution for its customer base, with approximately half in North America and the remainder spread globally. This gives the vendor a competitive advantage to expand within each region.
Product strategy: Vtiger offers a one-product approach that includes sales, marketing, invoice and project capabilities, which are commonly requested by SMBs. The addition of the free pilot edition in 2021 has decreased the risk of deploying a new SFA tool.
Product development: Vtiger has a monthly release schedule and each release has multiple feature enhancements, as well as new capabilities to improve the product. Some capabilities were generated from customers, such as built-in dialer capabilities, Facebook Ad integration, enrichment of contacts from LinkedIn, and stripe integration for subscriptions.
Cautions
Retention: Vtiger has a comparatively low customer retention rate relative to most of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
Market strategy: Vtiger lacks vertical-specific products and an app marketplace, which Leaders offer in support of a broader range of industries. Vtiger offers no differentiation between its midmarket and enterprise sales strategies, and targets SMB customers.
Implementation strategy: Vtiger expects clients to self-implement with the help of a four-hour onboarding session. For customers with over 100 users, it provides turnkey implementation services. These factors are considerations for companies with complex sales processes that need help understanding how to apply Vtiger’s SFA product to their sales processes.
Zendesk
Zendesk is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. The Zendesk Sell product for SFA features capabilities that are suitable for small and midsize sales organizations. Zendesk has a presence in all geographic regions, but mostly concentrates on North America. Zendesk Sell integrates with the Zendesk Suite, a holistic platform that leverages features such as telephony integration, lead management and chat. It introduced features focused on improving seller efficiency, including Mapsly integration for meeting location routing, and a task player that allows sellers to build a queue of activities and execute them in immediate succession through a “play” feature. Zendesk’s product roadmap includes enhancements to pipeline analytics and tighter integration with the Zendesk Sunshine platform.
Strengths
Customer support: Compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Zendesk excels at supporting customers with training and onboarding services. It offers free on-demand training for administrators, developers and users. Zendesk expert support is included with all product editions.
Product capabilities: Zendesk has strengthened the integration of Zendesk Sell with the Zendesk Suite, adding improved account mapping, self-service data migration, and a community forum that spans sales and customer service functions. The product also offers email and task sequencing capabilities that are not common in other SFA applications for the midsize B2B market.
Viability: As a company, Zendesk has demonstrated strong financial performance in the past year. This bodes well for sales organizations looking for a financially stable vendor outside of some of the big SFA players.
Cautions
Market responsiveness: Zendesk has made a fairly modest number of product enhancements to Zendesk Sell. Compared with the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, it offers fewer native and add-on capabilities and is often dependent on third-party solutions. Zendesk Sell lacks a native PRM module, which is important for indirect sales use cases.
Innovation: Zendesk’s vision for future innovation includes integration with its Zendesk Explore analytics platform and continued integration development with the Zendesk Sales Suite. However, its roadmap currently lacks the introduction of other major SFA functions that prospective customers will expect from a B2B SFA solution.
Market strategy: Zendesk lacks a robust community of app vendors offering third-party add-ons to the Zendesk Sell product. The number of apps available in its marketplace is relatively few compared with other vendors in this research.
Zoho
Zoho returns as a Challenger in this year’s Magic Quadrant. Zoho CRM is well-suited to support sales organizations of all sizes. It has a flexible platform for configuring applications via a low-code/no-code interface and a business application designer for nontechnical employees. In the past year, Zoho has released a notable set of capabilities. These include a new recommendation builder for next-best-action recommendations, and workflow suggestions powered by Zia, its AI assistant, to suggest which workflows can be automated based on repeated manual execution. Planned innovations from Zoho include a new UI redesign canvas to help with user experience, a Zia sales strategy planner for outcome-driven next-best-action recommendations, and a Zoho CPQ solution.
Strengths
Innovation: Zoho has released a good amount of new capabilities that are truly differentiating. Examples include Remote Sales Office, which allows for in-app meeting experiences, lead and opportunity intent models, and Zia Workflow Automation Suggestions, an RPA-like solution.
Product features: Zoho maintains a high degree of native features that include core SFA and near-core SFA functionality, as well as those geared to support digital selling experiences and revenue models.
Sales strategy: Zoho has one of the most flexible pricing models for customers, with no requirements for long-term commitments and a monthly payment plan. It has also increased its efforts to sell globally through a tailored ABM program.
Cautions
Customer experience: Zoho received among the lowest overall experience ratings from its customer base on Gartner Peer Insights when compared with leading vendors evaluated. Customers cited customer support and application performance issues.
Market responsiveness: Zoho has released comparatively few sets of capabilities arising directly from customer requests. Furthermore, it has increased list pricing by approximately 16% on its product packaging, which is due to apply in January 2022. This may not provide enough time for alternatives for existing Zoho customers that are cost sensitive, and may deter prospects.
Sales execution: Zoho has to do more to compete globally with Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. It has comparatively few global or very large customers today. This may increase hesitation among sales organizations considering Zoho, as the perception suggests that the vendor cannot meet scalability requirements.
Vendors Added and Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
Added
HubSpot — This vendor met the criteria for inclusion this year.
Dropped
None
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
For Gartner clients, Magic Quadrant research identifies and then analyzes the most relevant providers and their products in a market. Gartner uses by default an upper limit of 20 vendors to support the identification of the most relevant providers in a market. On specific occasions the upper limit may be extended by Methodologies, where the intended research value to our clients might otherwise be diminished. The inclusion criteria represent the specific attributes that analysts believe are necessary for inclusion in this research.
To qualify for inclusion in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation, vendors were required to meet seven of the following eight criteria:
Serve as a system of record for account and contact management and sales activity management and opportunity management.
Serve as a system of record for pipeline management.
Serve as a system of record for forecast management.
Serve as a system of record for lead management capabilities, which includes functions for lead nurturing, lead conversion tracking, and lead attribution analysis.
Provide guided selling capabilities in the form of formal sales playbooks and workflow-based recommendations that align with sales playbooks, and/or AI-based prescriptive next best actions
Provide a platform for extending sales processes with custom user interfaces, custom data objects, custom data fields and custom workflows.
Provide open APIs that allow the solution to integrate with third-party applications.
Provide application mobile capabilities, whereby sellers and their managers can manage their primary daily sales from either a natively provided mobile application or from a low-code mobile application development SDK.
If vendors met these initial criteria, they were then required to meet both of the following criteria to qualify:
Have customers with live sales execution platform implementations in at least two of the three use cases for sales execution platform Critical Capabilities: B2B sales, B2C sales and indirect/relationship sales.
Have made at least two major CRM SFA releases with significant functional improvements during the 12 months from 1 March 2020 through 28 February 2021; a new or acquired offering from an established vendor in this market is also considered, if Gartner established that offering was being sold to customers.
If vendors met both of these initial criteria, they were then required to meet at least four of the following five criteria:
Have at least 50 customers with live sales execution platform implementations as of 1 February 2021, spanning at least four industries, in accordance with industry definitions established by Gartner.
Have an average number of SFA paid users (not partner users, nor freemium users) per customer (not org/instance) of at least 25 users as of 1 February 2021.
Have generated revenue from SFA software of at least $13 million during the calendar year 2020.
During the 12 months from 1 March 2020 through 28 February 2021, closed SFA contracts with at least 10 new logos (not new contracts sold to an existing client) on deals that exceed $750,000 in total contract value, or closed SFA contracts with at least 50 new logos on deals between $10,000 and $750,000 in total contract value.
Have deployments in at least three regions (North America, South America, Central America, EMEA, Asia/Pacific).
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Different sales organizations require different levels of depth and complexity in terms of capabilities. Vendors that support a wide range of complexity have greater market potential, and are rated accordingly. As this is a cross-industry Magic Quadrant, evaluation of a provider’s offering is focused on the ability to serve several broad industry sectors, not to provide industry-specific solutions.
Product or Service: This criterion looks at core goods and services that compete in and/or serve the defined market. Vendors are evaluated on the quality of their native SFA capabilities, including both the core capabilities and SFA extensions. Vendors are also evaluated on technical considerations such as ease of use and administrative functions. Gartner assesses information provided from the Gartner Peer Insights data, as well as other, publicly available sources, from the Critical Capabilities research and from observations collected from Gartner inquiries.
Overall Viability: This is an assessment of the organization’s overall financial health, as well as the financial and practical success of the business unit. We consider the likelihood of the organization continuing to offer and invest in the product, as well as the product position in the current portfolio.
Vendors will be rated on additional factors such as customer retention rate, and ability to generate revenue specifically in the SFA market.
Sales Execution/Pricing: This includes an organization’s capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. It considers deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. The vendor must provide global sales and distribution coverage that aligns with its marketing messages. It must have specific experience and success selling SFA applications to sales buying centers (i.e., the VP of sales or sales operations) and to application leaders. Among the many factors in this category, Gartner evaluates the number of new customers acquired, growth in SFA revenue, average SFA deal size, average contract duration and customer retention. Gartner also evaluates clients’ satisfaction with contacting and negotiation processes.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: This criterion considers a vendor’s ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. We also consider the vendor’s history of responsiveness to changing market demands. Gartner evaluates the quality and depth of the vendor’s releases, and the ability to release functions requested by clients.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization’s message in order to influence the market, promote the brand, increase awareness of products and establish a positive identification in the minds of customers. This “mind share” can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional, thought leadership, social media, referrals and sales activities.
Gartner will measure the frequency and quality of the vendor’s marketing techniques, including but not limited to its use of publicity promotions, and thought leadership in social channels or print publications. Gartner will also evaluate the vendor’s presence on the shortlists of Gartner’s clients and the scope of available third-party solutions.
Customer Experience: This criterion considers products and services and/or programs that enable customers to achieve anticipated results with the products evaluated — specifically, quality supplier/buyer interactions, technical support or account support. This may also include ancillary tools, customer support programs, availability of user groups and SLAs. Feedback from active customers on generally available releases during the past 12 to 18 months is an important consideration. Sources of feedback include vendor-supplied references, Gartner client inquiries and other customer-facing interactions, such as at Gartner conferences. Customer experiences are evaluated based on the vendor’s ability to help customers achieve positive business value, as well as sustained user adoption, quality implementation and ongoing support.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet goals and commitments.
Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria
Weighting
Product or Service
High
Overall Viability
Medium
Sales Execution/Pricing
Medium
Market Responsiveness/Record
High
Marketing Execution
Medium
Customer Experience
High
Operations
Medium
Source: Gartner (August 2021)
Completeness of Vision
Gartner evaluates vendors on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements. This includes current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs and competitive forces, as well as how well these statements map to Gartner’s view of the market.
Market Understanding: This includes the ability to understand customer needs and translate them into products and services. Vendors that show a clear vision for their market listen, understand customer demands, and can shape or enhance market changes with this. Vendors must define how their SFA solutions improve clients’ sales process execution and support sales effectiveness objectives. Vendors must also define their competitive differentiators, value proposition and the outcomes achieved by their clients. Vendors are also evaluated on their articulated and demonstrated ability to align with clients’ customer experience, digital business and sales execution optimization objectives.
Marketing Strategy: In this category we look for clear, differentiated messaging that is consistently communicated internally and externalized through social media, advertising, partner programs, system integrators, customer programs and positioning statements. Vendors are evaluated on their segmentation strategy and how their solution appeals to selling organizations in multiple verticals, as well as prospects with 50 or more sales sellers. If the vendor gets a significant percentage of revenue from recurring revenue-based products, it must also have a customer retention strategy.
Sales Strategy: In this category we primarily look for a sound strategy for selling that uses the appropriate direct and indirect sales strategy, as well as partners that extend the scope and depth of market reach, expertise, technologies, services and customer base. Vendors are evaluated on their ability to sell to both business and IT stakeholders, as well as to the segments defined in the marketing strategy.
Offering (Product) Strategy: This category includes the vendor’s approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes market differentiation, functionality, methodology and features, as they map to current and future requirements. Gartner assesses the vendor’s product and packaging offerings. The vendor should not only demonstrate a product vision that accounts for core SFA functionality (as defined by the market’s core capabilities), but also one that offers new application functionality across the breadth and depth of product capabilities. The latter consideration is critical for meeting the needs of a maturing market.
Subcapabilities include, but are not limited to, the vendor’s vision for:
Sales enablement capabilities, such as content management, sales training and coaching
B2B and B2C digital commerce
Sales effectiveness capabilities, such as CPQ or order management
Integration with third-party sales applications
Business Model: In this category we look for how the design, logic and execution of the organization’s business proposition helps it achieve continued success. Vendors need to have clear business plans for how they will be successful in the SFA market. These business plans should include appropriate levels of investment to achieve profitability and healthy revenue growth during a three- to five-year period. Sales channels and partnership strategies are important components.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: In this category we look for how the vendor deploys products to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals. Vendors will be evaluated on the scope of native-built applications that automate industry-specific sales processes in verticals such as financial services and life sciences. Vendors will also be evaluated on the scope of third-party partnerships with ISVs that offer industry-specific capabilities.
Innovation: This concerns direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or preemptive purposes. Vendors are evaluated on the quality of their enhancements and product releases. Vendors must show continued investment in improving core SFA capabilities. They must also show growth in new areas such as improving sales execution, analytics, social collaboration and SaaS; or new devices such as tablets and smartphones; or new technology directions such as digital business.
Geographic Strategy: We look at the vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the “home” or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market. Vendors will be evaluated on the percentage of employees allocated to the regions, as well as the depth and scope of partners available in those regions.
Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria
Weighting
Market Understanding
High
Marketing Strategy
Medium
Sales Strategy
Medium
Offering (Product) Strategy
High
Business Model
Low
Vertical/Industry Strategy
Low
Innovation
High
Geographic Strategy
Medium
Source: Gartner (August 2021)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders have the Ability to Execute their vision through products, services and demonstrably solid business results, in the form of revenue and earnings. Leaders have significant successful worldwide customer deployments in a wide variety of industries, and with multiple proof points for deployments above 500 users. They demonstrate consistently above-average customer experience levels, product execution scores and sales execution scores. They demonstrate product leadership, delivering new enhancements and innovations on a consistent schedule. They also provide thought leadership, showing customers and prospects how their SFA solutions improve sales execution and sales processes.
Challengers
Challengers are often larger than most (but not all) Niche Players, and demonstrate a higher volume of new business for SFA. They have the size to compete worldwide, but in some cases may not be able to execute equally well in all geographies. They often return strong customer experience satisfaction scores. They understand the evolving needs of a sales organization, yet may not lead customers into new functional areas with a strong functional vision.
Challengers tend to have a good technology vision for architecture and other IT organizational considerations, but have not won over the top sales executives and/or application leaders in the IT organization.
Visionaries
Visionaries are ahead of most potential competitors in delivering innovative products and/or delivery models. They anticipate emerging and changing sales needs and move the market into fresh areas with solutions that improve sales execution.
Visionaries have strong potential to influence the direction of the SFA market, but are limited in terms of execution and/or track record.
Niche Players
Niche Players offer products for SFA functionality, but may lack some functional components. They may not show the ability to consistently handle deployments of more than 500 users across multiple geographies, or they may lack strong business execution in the SFA market. These vendors may offer complete portfolios for a specific industry, but face challenges in one or more areas necessary to support cross-industry requirements, such as complex forecasting and sales effectiveness. They may have an inconsistent implementation track record, or they may lack the ability to support the requirements of large enterprises.
Niche Players often offer the best solutions for the needs of particular sales organizations, considering the price/value ratio of their solutions.
Context
Given that there are more than 75 SFA vendors worldwide, the vendors in this research are a small part of the overall SFA vendor market. There are hundreds more vendors that provide basic contact management software, which is a subset of SFA. And there are dozens of vendors that have built vertical-specific SFA solutions.
Because it is not possible to review every SFA provider, this Magic Quadrant evaluates SFA solutions that are broadly applicable to many differently sized sales organizations and verticals.
We place particular emphasis on vendors’ core SFA capabilities, as described in the Market Definition/Description section of this Magic Quadrant. However, for the purpose of building as complete a picture as possible, we also evaluate their noncore SFA capabilities, such as content management.
SFA means different things to different types of sales organizations:
Product-driven, transactional sales organizations, such as those with short-cycle B2B sales, value basic lead and opportunity management capabilities to reduce sales cycles and improve sales management visibility.
Product and service organizations selling enterprisewide deals, such as long-cycle B2B sales organizations, will value account management and forecasting capabilities. These organizations often also value lead management, CPQ and sales content management systems. They often tie together proposals, bids, configurations and quotes with authorizations and order capture systems. Organizations operating in this space require granular forecasting and pipeline management features.
Organizations engaged in relationship selling require SFA tools to manage their customer and prospect data, but they also require sales enablement tools for content distribution and sales activity capture.
Organizations that sell via indirect sales channels require PRM capabilities.
Sales Organization Sizing
In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner refers to sales organization customer sizes or vendor target segments. We define these segments as follows:
Small business — fewer than 50 sales users
MSE or midsize business — 50 to 500 sales users
Large business — 501 to 1,000 sales users
Enterprise-size — more than 1,000 sales users
Market Overview
There are several notable drivers for sales force automation (SFA) solutions today, which have surfaced in most Gartner inquiries:
Sales leaders, amid a pandemic, are reevaluating their sales technology stack investments to encompass more virtual selling or remote selling capabilities and self-service digital commerce. Gartner has fielded numerous inquiries that relate to virtual selling scenarios. For example, there is an increasing need to pivot to digital channels to help increase sales resiliency and overcome challenges when face-to-face interactions are not possible. Some SFA vendors have responded to these challenges by releasing video meeting solutions or further integrating with some known unified communication providers. Others are considering integrations with AR/VR solutions to help increase sales effectiveness. And many others are increasingly selling digital commerce capabilities to support B2B transactions. It is common for Gartner clients to inquire about best-of-breed forecasting vendors to supplement SFA purchases, as many hold the view that leading SFA forecasting capabilities lack the ability to address complex forecasting needs. There is no shortage of options and considerations to be made. But one thing is clear: all future sales models point toward a multiexperience sales model.
Multiexperience/total experience selling. Sales organizations are increasingly trying to understand customer journeys and require the need for SFA systems to interact with a variety of channels to glean insights and personalize communications. These types of interactions are pointing toward the need to enable the SFA system to be more tightly interwoven with other customer-facing systems and interaction channels. Other clients ask for ways in which vendors support an optimal user experience (UX), and sales experience, such as collaborating with peers and customers via productivity platforms often seen in Microsoft Teams or Slack. Collaboration a la Slack or Teams between customers and sellers today is nascent, but sales organizations are starting to reevaluate the sales workbench and tools used to ensure sales efficiency.
Sales analytics and insights. Gartner fields increasing inquiries on vendors’ ability to provide additional analytics and insights into the SFA platform in order to discover factors driving deal success, such that sales organizations are revisiting outdated sales forecasting processes and are more willing to supplement with AI and ML techniques to glean insights.Others are fixated on addressing data integrity and the ability to utilize advanced analytics technology.
Functionality Trends
The top market trend is the expansion of AI and virtual selling capabilities in SFA, whereby remote selling using collaboration tools and unified communications is becoming an essential part of the sales technology stack. Furthermore, SFA tools are increasingly moving from systems of record toward systems of engagement and insights, respectively for fostering more seamless interactions and increasing effectiveness via analytics. To support more seamless experiences, SFA solutions will eventually extend their ability to act as a system of experience by decreasing friction in communication and collaboration with partners, customers and other sellers. For more information on the emerging modern sales technology stack, see Modern Sales Technology Emerges to Support the New World of Buying and Selling.
Prescriptive next best actions — an aspect of B2B guided selling capabilities — is rapidly improving in maturity and on the horizon for many vendors. AI/ML predictive analytics exist in most SFA vendor solutions today to a degree, whether on opportunities or leads or both. Customers will need to evaluate specific predictive needs and ML model configurability to differentiate offerings such as those used for forecasting, lead or opportunity scoring.
Fewer than a handful of vendors have released conversational intelligence/sales coaching platform capabilities, some to a limited degree of functionality. These have been top of mind for many customers inquiring about the effectiveness and ability of such solutions in the best-of-breed market. Gartner expects this trend to increase among SFA vendor offerings.
Most vendors offer a unified CRM data model in which service, marketing and sales core objects or entities are consistent across the application stacks. This model has since reached market maturity and is no longer a differentiating value proposition.
Basic process automation capabilities — such as activity capture of email data and calendar events — are a relatively mature capability of most SFA solutions.
Fewer than a handful of vendors offer the ability to capture and automate specific customer-designated processes using robotic process mining and/or robotic process automation (RPA). This trend is expected to increase in order to reduce sales process friction in an effort to shift focus toward sales effectiveness measurements.
Evaluation Criteria Definitions
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.
Perkembangan teknologi di masa pandemi berkembang sangat cepat, dan ada 5 tren yang sedang terjadi secara global dan juga di Indonesia, khususnya di perusahaan atau instansi.
Hal ini yang akan dibahas secara detail dalam berbagai webinar EVENTCERDAS.COM, didukung oleh BISKOM dan Asosiasi Pengusaha TIK Nasional (APTIKNAS).
Apa saja 5 tren itu ?
Pertama, AUTOMATION. Semua sistem sekarang dibuat otomatis bisa berjalan. Kecenderungan banyak perusahaan yang harus bisa menerima kondisi sebagian besar karyawannya bekerja secara remote (work of home). Akibatnya banyak pekerjaan yang biasanya dilakukan manusia, mulai dipikirkan untuk dilakukan oleh sistem secara otomatis.
Kedua, DIGITAL WORKPLACE. Semua karyawan, baik yang bekerja secara remote, atau bekerja di kantor, sekarang dihadapkan pada tren baru, bekerja secara digital. Bekerja secara digital ini harus bisa mendukung mereka mengakses berbagai resource, aplikasi, file dan lainnya, dari mana saja dengan cepat dan tepat.
Ketiga, CYBERSECURITY. Mau tidak mau, karena semua karyawan mengakses dari rumah, mereka mengakses dari berbagai media koneksi yang ada. Perusahaan, instansi berpikir keras mengamankan akses mereka, serta memastikan aplikasi, database, bahkan email dapat diakses , digunakan dengan aman. Dalam kesempatan kali ini HGC akan mengupas phishing dan data breach sebagai pembahasan utama.
Ketiga, HYBRID CLOUD. Karena tingginya keperluan akses data yang tinggi dari luar ruang server, data center kantor perusahaan, maka banyak mereka mulai melakukan migrasi ke cloud. Tapi tetap mengutamakan faktor kehati-hatian, banyak perusahaan cenderung menggunakan pendekatan hybrid cloud.
Kelima, BANK DIGITIZATION. Salah satu bidang industri yang ditantang bergerak cepat di Indonesia adalah perbankan. Mereka harus menyiapkan diri menjadi bank digital, memastikaan semua layanan tetap bisa berjalan, dan perusahaan, instansi tetap bisa terhubung, melakukan transaksi dengan mudah. Maka digitalisasi bank menjadi fokus utama dari banyak bank saat ini.
Semua ini akan dibahas dalam rangkaian webinar setiap Kamis siang, jam 14-16 WIB. Pastikan kehadiran anda dalam berbagai kegiatan webinar kami.
