A recent study by Access Markets International Partners (AMI) reported that U.S. small- and medium-sized business (SMB) spending on enterprise software reached nearly US$1 billion during 2003.  Applications included in that figure were customer-relationship management (CRM), sales-force automation (SFA), enterprise-resource planning (ERP) and supply-chain management (SCM).  The study was based on a survey of more than 1,450 IT decision makers from businesses of all sizes in the United States.

Certainly, this growth is a positive trend.  While the major software vendors may not have done a great job to-date serving the SMB market, the growth of the hosted CRM market in particular is driving lots of competition and providing SMBs with a slew of very attractive CRM alternatives such as Salesforce.com (www.salesforce.com), SalesBoom.com (www.salesboom.com), Siebel CRM On Demand (www.crmondemand.com), and NetSuite (www.netsuite.com).  Let’s face it, with costs as low as $10 per user per month, it’s easy to make a solid return-on-investment and dramatically impact revenues and profitability.