I was just gathering information as a business owner the other day, so this time I'd like to change things up a bit and talk about the CRM market.

Currently, the CRM market is one of the top growing markets in the EA (Enterprise Application) market, both domestically and internationally, boasting an annual growth rate of over 15%, and is said to be in a state of warring states with many warlords competing for power. The market size is said to be over 2 trillion yen (approximately 5,000 billion yen in Japan).
Even in Gartner's report, the top CRM vendor has not been determined, and the current top vendor only has a market share of around 15%, meaning that the top four combined account for less than half of the market share.
Furthermore, as the market continues to expand, the CRM market has the unusual circumstance that the top vendors change depending on the area.

Reference site:Gartner compares four CRM vendors: Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft

(Source: Gartner, February 2015)

So what happens if we turn our attention to the domestic market?

When it comes to large companies, the products they support are almost always decided, and the top three companies (Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP) remain in the market competition, so I think it would be more useful to target medium-sized and small companies, which are seeing the most change.
For a CRM market report aimed at medium-sized and small businesses, the report published by Nocri Research is a useful reference.

reference:CRM usage and user evaluations among small and medium-sized enterprises in 2015 (Nocre Research publication)

This report evaluates market share in three areas, and the top three are listed below.

• Over 20 billion yen to less than 50 billion yen: Microsoft, SFDC, OSK, Oracle (tie, 11.1%)
• Over 50 billion yen to less than 100 billion yen: SFDC (20%), Microsoft/OSK (tie, 15%)
• Over 100 billion yen to less than 300 billion yen: Microsoft and SAP (tied at 19.2%), Oracle (11.5%)

I hadn't noticed it either, but Microsoft's Dynamics CRM actually holds the top overall market share even for small and medium-sized businesses!

Originally, Dynamics CRM was released to enable small and medium-sized businesses to use CRM with functionality equal to or greater than Siebel. However, after Dynamics CRM 4.0 was released for large-scale deployments, it was adopted by large companies, and the image of it was that it was aimed at large companies. However, perhaps because Microsoft has recently been promoting Dynamics CRM Online along with Azure and Office 3 as one of the three cloud brothers, I was quite impressed as one of the members who launched the CRM business at Microsoft that it has stuck to the original concept (laughs).

Leaving aside Oracle, which has so many different products that they are fragmented, SAP is only used by companies of a certain size, and SFDC, which is only ahead in name as a lingering vestige of the cloud boom, only has a track record with companies with less than 100 billion yen in sales, and in companies with sales of over 100 billion yen, it does not even have a 1% share.(I don't know if SFDC is only suitable for small and medium-sized businesses, or if many companies have stopped using it, but a market share of 0% is pretty impressive...)

Microsoft doesn't promote itself much, so I'll make a statement instead.Looking at the actual situation, Dynamics CRM has the top market share in all areas of the business, and its market share is steadily increasing every year. It can be said that it is undoubtedly the top CRM software product at the moment..

Arcus Japan is a company with world-class experience and capabilities in Dynamics CRM, a leading software company, and is trusted by the market. However, this is precisely why we have no intention of monopolizing the market as a single company. We seek to coexist and prosper together with our many customers and the CRM partners who support them, and we have developed and are providing a wide range of support products and services for the implementation of Dynamics CRM.

• Dynamics CRM (xRM) Support Products
• CRM Services

In the highly information-oriented society (ubiquitous society and knowledge-creating society) that has emerged since the IT revolution, the consumer economy has matured, and we are no longer in an era of "economies of scale (dominance of large corporations)" where one company monopolizes things, but rather an era of "economy of connectivity (dominance of venture companies)" where multiple companies collaborate.
In particular, CRM is a market with many subcategories, so it is crucial to quickly collaborate with companies that have their own strengths to create solutions, and I believe that only creative and speedy venture companies can achieve this.

Japan is still a society that relies on large corporations, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Manufacturing White Paper clearly shows that the country has fallen behind in the information society.
Whether or not a company can utilize IT can make a huge difference to its competitiveness, so I would like all user companies to start with CRM and determine what is truly useful for their company, rather than blindly believing in large companies.