Competition for the global CRM applications market is getting tighter with only one or two percent of market share separating the top vendors, IDC reports.

According to its latest Worldwide Semiannual CRM Applications Tracker, which monitors more than 190 CRM vendors (global and local) across a total of 49 countries, one area of differentiation is the geographic basis upon which their market shares are built.

While Oracle holds the lead in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan), Salesforce.com is very strong in North America and Japan. And SAP is the established leader in EMEA and Latin America.

According to the figures, the top 10 vendors made up 49% of the market in 2011, gaining 0.8% compared to 2010. IBM broke into the top 10 list for the first time in 2011 with double-digit year-over-year growth.

Other top-growing vendors among the top 10 included SAP, Salesforce.com, and NICE Systems whilst SAS, Adobe, Microsoft, Nuance Communications, RightNow Technologies, Interactive Intelligence, and LivePerson were all among the top 25 CRM Applications vendors.

Mary Wardley, program VP of CRM Applications at IDC, said: “The CRM applications market is poised on the threshold of a transformation with legacy installations being transformed into socially-aware applications environments. Early movement has been observed for the last several years.

“An influx of new social vendors and acquisitions of social CRM applications providers by established vendors augmenting their offerings for rapid market entry is invigorating the market. The activity is expected to continue through 2012 and is bringing net-new revenue to the space.”

Monitoring biannual market size and vendor share – as well as forecasting data for marketing automation, sales automation, customer service, and contact centre markets – the tracker also revealed a slowdown in growth in the second half of the year compare to the first.

However, as previously predicted, the overall market still managed to achieve a year-over-year growth rate of 11.2% for the full year, said the report.

Meanwhile, the research revealed contact centre applications grew at a single-digit rate losing almost 1.4% of market share. Although IDC predicted the contact centre market will maintain a positive growth rate over the 2012-2016 forecast period, the research firm also forecast that the trend of losing market share will continue, with contact centre applications expected to lose an additional 3.4% through 2016.