Businesses continue to increase their spending on customer relationship management (CRM), with analyst group Gartner predicting that sales will top $7.4 billion in 2007, up 14% year-on-year.

Gartner notes that much of that growth comes from spending on salesforce automation software. This growth has been fuelled by demand for sales software delivered as over the Internet.

“As businesses refresh existing sales force automation systems to align with their renewed drive for business and revenue growth, we expect this to push sales software to become the largest CRM sub-segment by 2011.”

CRM deployed in a software-as-a-service model, such as that offered by Salesforce.com accounted for 12% of total CRM sales in 2006; by the end 2007 Gartner predicts this will have risen to 14%.

However, while Gartner predicts that spending on CRM will continue to grow in the long term, it said that companies could scale back plans over the next 12-18 months, in response to changes in the global economy.