Entellium Bucks On Demand

Entellium has made available its new SFA application designed specifically for mobile devices. EMobile is built around a new sliding menu system to allow sales professionals to work from Smartphones and is part of Entellium's other release yesterday, eDesktop, an upgrade to the company's hosted CRM suite. Having always focused on making its applications intuitive and simple to use, Entellium branded its new eMobile application as the new "iTunes for wireless CRM," according to the company. The SFA solution is designed so salespeople can navigate the application's sliding menus with one thumb. EMobile is also wirelessly linked to Entellium's on-demand datacenter, so road warriors can remotely access the same information that their colleagues in the office can. Pricing for eMobile starts at $25 per user, per month, and is currently available on a number of Palm, Windows Mobile, and RIM phones. "Salespeople don't need to spend a great deal of time navigating the application," says Paul Johnston, CEO of Entellium. "The most important activities and customer records are presented automatically. We call our mobile solution CRM under one thumb, because it's so easy to use, people can do it with one hand." Available as a free download for Entellium subscribers, Entellium eDesktop's big enhancement is a downloadable smart client that's designed to boost the application's speed by being faster than a Web-based CRM application. EDesktop automatically detects when the user is online and stays connected to Entellium servers, continuously synchronizing data, just like a desktop email application does. When the user is not connected to the Internet eDesktop behaves just the same, giving users the ability to add new records or update information. As soon as the connection is reestablished eDesktop detects it automatically and syncs up with the Entellium datacenter. "As an on-demand provider, of course we looked at Web 2.0 technologies to enhance the user experience, but we found we could accomplish so much more in terms of user effectiveness through a smart client approach," Johnston says. Entellium is doing a good job of addressing an old, still-prevalent issue in CRM with the new products and enhancements: end-user adoption. Rob Bois, research director at AMR Research, says, "SFA adoption in particular is still a major issue with CRM, despite the efforts of many vendors over the years." Bois also says the SaaS and on-demand revolution has served as a "catalyst for traditional CRM vendors to rethink how they approach their user interfaces and the overall usability of the software." Incorporating smart-client technology is a perfect example. The traditional assumption has always been that SaaS or on-demand has to be run in a browser, but Entellium "is bucking that trend in order to deliver a richer user experience." Related articles: The 2005 CRM Market Leaders, Part 1 Salesforce.com Makes a Mobility Move

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