Green Beacon helps mid-market companies with their implementations of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. The company's CEO, Ben Holtz, recently spoke to us about the state of the segment with regards to CRM.

"We're seeing more of a focus on reporting and analytics than there was in the past," Holtz says. "There's more of an interest in getting data out." Doing so doesn't necessarily mean working with established analytics vendors, whether indirectly or directly (that is, through partners and tool integration with CRM vendors) "SQL Reporting Services is free with SQL Server," Holtz notes, offering his own company as an example. "All our Microsoft CRM reports replace Crystal [Reports] with that tool."

It's good news for mid-market CRM customers that they have more, and cheaper, analytics tools at their disposal. Another development in the segment, at least according to Holtz, is a mild shift in dynamics. "I don't hear as much about Salesforce.com as I did six months ago," Holtz says. "I don't know if the outages killed some of their buzz."

Meanwhile, some of the momentum has been taken over by Siebel (now Oracle). Holtz says he's seen plenty of deals "that I'd have called Onyx deals, but Siebel won them. They've become very aggressive in pricing tactics."

Despite some of the ground-level shifts in the segment, Holtz is quick to note that it has no clear-cut leader. That should be a spur to vendors struggling to win share in what has been one of CRM's most important segments since its inception.