Worldwide spending on CEM and CRM applications grew 15.6% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018, according to research from Gartner. Worldwide enterprise application software revenue totalled more than $193.6 billion in 2018. CRM made up almost a quarter of that revenue.
Roughly 72.9% of CRM spending was on software as a service (SaaS) in 2018, which is expected to grow to 75% of total CRM software spending in 2019, with agility and flexibility being big drivers, along with the requirement for remote and mobile users.
“Cloud growth has dropped slightly in 2018 but remains strong at 20% and significantly above the overall growth rate of 15.6% for CRM,” said Julian Poulter, senior director analyst at Gartner. “As an early mover to the cloud, CRM software is probably seeing a gradual reduction in cloud growth rates due to high adoption.”
The top five CRM software vendors accounted for more than 40% of the total market in 2018 The top five vendors had very little change in ranking compared with 2017, although Microsoft climbed into fifth position, narrowly displacing Genesys.
CRM Software Spending by Vendor, Total Software Revenue Worldwide, 2018 (Millions of U.S. Dollars)
| Company | 2018 Revenue | 2018 Market Share (%) | 2017 Revenue | 2017 Market Share (%) |
| Salesforce | 9,420.5 | 19.5 | 7,648.1 | 18.3 |
| SAP | 4,012.2 | 8.3 | 3,474.4 | 8.3 |
| Oracle | 2,669.0 | 5.5 | 2,492.9 | 6.0 |
| Adobe | 2,454.8 | 5.1 | 2,017.2 | 4.8 |
| Microsoft | 1,302.0 | 2.7 | 1,132.1 | 2.7 |
| Others | 28,371.7 | 58.8 | 24,962.0 | 59.9 |
| Total | 48,230.2 | 100.0 | 41,726.7 | 100.0 |
Source: Gartner (June 2019)