Salesforce.com Goes Mobile

For the first time, mobile sales professionals will be able to request data from Salesforce.com's CRM applications via email on handheld devices. Salesforce.com has selected Dejima Inc., a developer of mobile access solutions, to provide Salesforce.com customers with the ability to have mobile access to their customer information via the Dejima Direct SFA product and mobile products such as BlackBerry Wireless Handhelds. "Salesforce.com is committed to enhancing the productivity of mobile sales professionals," said Cary Fulbright, senior vice president of marketing and products at Salesforce.com. "By leveraging our standards-based Web Services architecture and XML API's, Dejima was able to quickly deploy a solution that allows our customers to gain access to their critical information anytime, anywhere." Dejima's patented natural interaction technology enables sales reps to simply send an email to salesforce@dejimadirect.com with requests for actions or reports. Dejima then interprets user requests for information and retrieves data, delivering it back to the user via email. The response rate, according to Antoine Blondeau, chief executive, Dejima, is roughly five seconds, depending on network congestion. Once the end-user receives a response, he/she can then act: ask for more detailed information, forward relevant data to peers and managers, or even follow up with clients to close a deal. There are currently 15 Salesforce.com customers Beta testing the Dejima Direct SFA product and Blondeau expects at least half to stay on when Dejima starts charging $10 per user, per month, beginning May 15th. While this is Dejima's first end-to-end solution in the enterprise space, Blondeau expects, as more CRM vendors push toward wireless solutions that mobile CRM applications will account for 50 percent of Dejjima's revenue within 12 months. "Our core value is in our ability to take someone's natural language words and queries and develop an XML statement and map and fish for the XML API off the vendor. Once we develop a solution with common SFA functionality, it's easy to do it across the board for other vendors," Blondeau says. "We've only started in the enterprise market about six months ago. The Dejima SFA for Salesforce.com product is our first product. However, we're working with Research In Motion and SAP on similar internal wireless sales force automation solutions."