Worldwide customer relationship management (CRM) software totaled $26.3 billion in 2015, up 12.3% from $23.4 billion in 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com).

“The merger and acquisition activity that began flowing through the market in 2009 continued in 2015, with more than 30 notable acquisitions, Julian Poulter, research director at Gartner. “This has resulted in increased competition at the top end of the CRM market, with the continued focus of global vendors’ sales forces driving good growth worldwide in all CRM subsegments but only for cloud or software as a service (SaaS) applications.”

Overall, the top five CRM software vendors accounted for more than 45% of the total market in 2015. The top five vendors had very little change in ranking compared with 2014, although Adobe jumped into the fifth position, displacing IBM, as it continues to lead the CRM marketing segment with a focus on marketing agencies and the chief marketing officer (CMO).

“CRM growth is driven by cloud service revenue, which, in the application space, uses SaaS as the major delivery model,” said Poulter. “SaaS revenue grew 27% year-over-year, which is more than double overall CRM market growth in 2015. On-premises new license revenue declined 1 percent for the same period.”

Salesforce continued to dominate the CRM market in 2015, with 19.7% of the market. Salesforce leads in revenue in the sales and customer service and support (CSS) segments of CRM, and it is now third in revenue in the marketing segment, where it is the fastest-growing segment among the top five.