Can Salesforce.com Fix What's Wrong With Mobile Apps?Can Salesforce.com Fix What's Wrong With Mobile Apps?

The PDA is rapidly trickling down from the executive suite and into the hands of the rank and file. But handing employees PDAs is a lot easier than giving them worthwhile business applications to run on the devices. An app that works on a BlackBerry won't necessarily work on a Palm Treo. And the mobile versions of vendors' software usually don't offer the functions or level of access to company data that apps for PCs do.

CRM software-as-a-service provider Salesforce.com is stepping up to the plate with its $15 million acquisition of Sendia last week. Sendia makes a package that includes developer tools, an application server, and mobile client software that's designed to cut a lot of the work companies need to do to provide mobile access to business apps. "We have a vision: To create once and run everywhere," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said last week in a news conference.

Sendia isn't new to Salesforce. In February, Sendia released Workspace CRM 4.0 software for Salesforce users. Salesforce says it has integrated Sendia's Workspace technology with its AppExchange, a vendor partnership program Salesforce started in January for developing, sharing, and selling applications using a hosted service model. The result is a new service called AppExchange Mobile that lets customers wirelessly access Salesforce and AppExchange applications from various devices for $50 a user per month.

AppExchange Mobile supports 60 applications, most of them from small companies that serve niches, such as Ketera Technologies, which makes supply chain software, and Remend, which makes apps for the financial industry. Developers can modify the applications using 37,000 custom objects stored in Salesforce's Web server. Benioff says the company is working to add mobile support for more apps in such areas as real estate, financial planning, and health care.

Some of Salesforce's customers are encouraged by the development. Hanger Orthopedic Group, a prosthetics maker, believes switching its salespeople from the Treo 650 to the BlackBerry 8700c would make it easier for them to log their phone calls in Salesforce's app, says Brian Moody, Hanger's regional VP of sales. Because of AppExchange Mobile, the call-logging application won't need to be modified, he says.

Lost Connection

Salesforce's software-as-a-service model seems to make sense for companies serious about access for mobile devices. Any PDA's processing power is rather limited--one reason why developing software that runs locally on devices is a turnoff for many companies. To get mobile access to software in the AppExchange program, users get an E-mail from their IT department with a link to launch an application, which runs on a hosted server.

But it also means users of mobile devices risk not getting much work done if the application servers or other data sources they must connect to aren't available. Earlier this month, Salesforce suffered a serious crash due to a faulty patch on its cache server that downed its CRM service for almost a day, until the patch could be removed and the cache servers restarted. That's the worst outage it has had, but just one of several since last year. Recognizing it can't promise its software service will never go down, Salesforce lets AppExchange Mobile customers work in disconnected mode. The changes salespeople make to customer files, for example, are stored on their devices and updated to the main software application as soon as they can get connected to the service.

To try to prevent outages, Salesforce says it has increased the core processing power within its West Coast data centers, and it has launched a "major fine-tuning effort on the part of our engineering team," says Bruce Francis, VP of corporate strategy. Its trust.salesforce.com Web site provides a public view on its system status and problems. The company also is building two facilities that will mirror all of the applications running in its data centers, taking over operations if the main facilities shut down.

Beyond Salesforce

Salesforce isn't the only business app vendor offering technologies to improve the usability of applications on mobile devices. Sybase's iAnywhere division has a portfolio of products called Mobile Solutions that synchronize data between back-end systems and mobile devices. Research In Motion offers a similar synchronization process between BlackBerrys and servers through its Mobile Data System.

Oracle has had mobile versions of some of its apps for several years, including salesforce automation, field service, supply chain, and warehouse management, and says it updates them for the newest devices. That keeps customers from having to go to third-party developers. "Most people want their mobile apps to be seamlessly integrated with front office and back office, and that's hard to do with third-party developers," says Jon Chorley, Oracle's VP of product strategy.

More than 280 RIM partners have developed business applications to run on the BlackBerry. Microsoft says its Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system supports about 20,000 off-the-shelf apps. However, mobile versions of vendors' business apps rarely work as well as the PC versions, and off-the-shelf software can require intensive integration.

Time will tell if Salesforce can offer something better now that it owns Sendia. And the AppExchange program is designed to make the process simpler. "It makes life so much easier to have just one vendor to deal with," says Hanger's Moody, "and it helps that it's the same one we use for our desktop applications."

There are certain problems that Salesforce's efforts can't solve, such as the small size of mobile devices or spotty connectivity through wireless carriers' networks. But if AppExchange Mobile is successful, it may spark interest from businesses that have been holding back on deploying mobile devices.