Apple Takes a Bite Into Enterprise CRM

Salesforce.com representatives unveiled a demo version of an application built expressly for the iPhone — but don’t expect to be downloading a Salesforce.com/iPhone offering right away.

According to an email statement from Salesforce.com, the software-as-a-service business technology vendor says it “is not releasing any dates at this time” for when its iPhone-native application might be released to the public.

Salesforce.com’s demonstration of a program for tracking contacts and sales leads gave attendees a feel for how applications could possibly look when the final product is ready for general consumption. What attendees (and those who watched the video archive at www.apple.com) saw could change, however: Salesforce.com Vice President of Developer Marketing Adam Gross says the company’s efforts with iPhone-native applications are still in the research-and-development stage. “A lot of the details around the iPhone and the specific capabilities are still under evaluation.” he adds. “We’re lucky enough to be an early partner with Apple in an evaluation capacity of the SDK — and that’s something that is going to continue.”

Regardless of the functionality in Saleforce.com’s market-ready iPhone application — and regardless of the timing of its eventual release — questions remain about just how “offline” and “native” users will truly be when the application does become generally available. “This sounds like a fat client something might run on the iPhone, but where will the data come from?” asks Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal at CRM consultancy Beagle Research Group. “The storage on the [iPhone] isn’t sufficient to cut the tie to the Internet unless what we’re really talking about is a detached client that calls home when a connection is available. If the latter is the case, it is technology Salesforce.com has had for awhile and it is adapting it to the iPhone’s [operating system].”

While declining to detail the scope of Salesforce.com’s potential offerings on the iPhone, Gross responds that it’s not really a choice of either offline or online. “We don’t really see it as an either/or,” he explains. “What we and other developers are looking for with the SDK is the ability to go outside of the [Web] browser for certain circumstances — the main one for us is ability to access offline data.”

Chuck Dietrich, vice president of Salesforce.com’s mobile division was quoted by InternetNews.com saying that “we’re bringing over 63,000 platform applications to the iPhone.” While that may be an end goal for Salesforce.com, company executives and analysts alike both agree that the full complement of programs currently available on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform will not be immediately available on the iPhone.

“We have 63,000 customer applications written on the Force.com platform today,” Gross says. “That’s really separate from what we have announced with Apple and the work we’re doing around the iPhone.” Pombriant agrees, saying that “it strikes me that this is potential rather than reality at the moment.”

Apple is dangling another long-awaited carrot in front of enterprise users: Starting in June, Apple will support Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol, allowing the iPhone to work directly with corporate servers running Microsoft’s popular Exchange — a move designed to entice users away from rival BlackBerry devices, which have traditionally led the enterprise market for handheld devices. Several CRM software providers already have offerings — such as NetSuite’s SuitePhone — that can be accessed using mobile phones (including the iPhone) via a Web browser. Unlike the new, native applications designed to run directly on the iPhone, those earlier incarnations provide support for Apple’s Safari Web browser, used on both the iPhone and on Apple’s Macintosh operating system.