Have a look on CRM Market and History

CRM has its roots in customer and contact management software. In the 1980's, tools like Goldmine and ACT provided good resources for managing customer databases and customer contacts so that companies could call or email more effectively. But these tools were mostly used simply to gather existing customer information and incoming customer contacts and then treat the whole customer list as one.
In the 1990s, enterprises began to need to treat their customers in a more sophisticated manner and treat customer groups differently. Early CRM pioneers started to treat enterprise management software categories as serious business. SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle had broad solutions that included CRM solutions as part of a package and Siebel started with CRM and then added to it. Interestingly Oracle has consolidated two of these companies into itself, making it one of the market leaders. SAP remains a strong overall solution but with CRM as one module within a larger offering, which is where Oracle has taken its consolidated offerings.
In addition there are many smaller companies specializing in CRM. In fact the original contact manager companies like Goldmine and ACT expanded their offerings to become true CRM. Goldmine is now part of the Front range suite and ACT is part of the Sage range of offerings.

Lessons from the History of CRM

The biggest change in CRM, however, came about with the advent of SaaS in the 2000's. The biggest trend is the rise of SaaS or hosted solutions and the leading name there is Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com dominates the hosted CRM market and has taken a lead in making a hosted solution acceptable even to the largest enterprises. The second development is the rise of open source solutions that start with free offerings and range on up to paid and fully supported enterprise class solutions. The leader in this area is SugarCRM. Microsoft is also a player in the hosted and on premise arenas with its Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution.
This brings us to the present day where there are a wide range of CRM offerings that cover a gamut from small to large hosted solutions, on premise offerings and even free CRM solutions. For anyone wishing to purchase a CRM solution there is absolutely a good solution available, but sorting out the details and making the right choice can be very difficult.