CRM will be dead in 10 years

The death knell is ringing for customer relationship management (CRM) packages, according to Vivek Ranadiv, Tibco's chairman and chief executive.

He claimed that CRM functions will be eclipsed by event management within 10 years as his vision of the Enterprise 3.0 becomes reality.

At the Tibco Tucon Conference in Las Vegas, he said: "The enterprise 2.0 world we live in today is transaction based, but we are now entering an era where events will replace transactions. We will move from this world where we continually have to ask questions and seek information into one where the information will seek you."

Ranadiv names the indicators of future developments as the reduction of costs for solid-state memory and the arrival of larger multi-core processors. This will provide the capacity and speed to capture more events, apply more rules and discover more inferences by correlating these events.

CRM will seem like the 20th Century technology that it really is, he claimed.

Ranadiv explained his concept of the two-second advantage'. "In the 21st Century, a telco customer will likely change supplier if six calls are dropped within a space of time. The two second' advantage would come into play if after the fifth dropped call the customer is retained with the offer of a few free SMS messages - and you top up his card within a 24-hour period."

"Every single event is a fingerprint in the industry and there are billions of these fingerprints coming from every single customer and it's important to make the exact right offer to a customer at the exact right time," he added.

He said that customers now expect problems to be anticipated and eliminated before they are badly affected. He does not believe that CRM can ever act fast enough to keep the new generation happy and that it will largely be replaced by event management within the next 10 years. "It's the end of an era for CRM," he said.