Salesforce.com’s Mobile Lite to Increase AppExchange Demand

Ten years ago, former Oracle executive Marc Benioff shook up the software world by going public with salesforce.com, the first Software as a Service (SaaS) to be taken seriously by the corporate world. Since then, SaaS has become big business. The market research firm Gartner estimates that SaaS applications will generate a whopping $6.5 billion in revenue in 2009.

Salesforce.com remains a giant in the SaaS world, with $1.3 billion in yearly revenue. But while salesforce.com has more than 55,000 corporate customers and more than 1.5 million individual subscribers, it still faces substantial challenges. According to the most recent Gartner report on CRM market shares, SAP and Oracle both generate more revenue than salesforce.com, and Microsoft’s revenues are growing at 75 percent a year, far outstripping salesforce.com’s yearly growth of 43 percent.

The AppExchange partner network depends on the ongoing success of salesforce.com. Because of this, the fact that salesforce.com continues to move aggressively to increase its market share while simultaneously blunting the advance of Microsoft’s offerings is good news.

Most recently, salesforce.com’s legendary aggressiveness took the form of Mobile Lite, a new, free, mobile offering that provides salesforce.com customers with instant remote access to their Salesforce CRM system. To grow market share, the application runs on the two most popular smart phones, the Apple iPhone and the RIM BlackBerry. And to blunt Microsoft’s CRM advance, the Mobile Lite application runs on Windows Mobile devices, thereby co-opting the company’s ability to leverage Windows Mobile to create more demand for Microsoft CRM Dynamics.

Mobile Lite builds on the success of the full mobile capabilities of salesforce.com and offers salesforce.com customers’ basic access to some of the most common Salesforce CRM features, including the ability to access dashboards, accounts, opportunities, cases, solutions, etc., as well as the ability to review account information before customer calls and meetings. It’s a move that strengthens salesforce.com’s competitive position in a growth segment of the CRM market, according to Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst at the market research firm Yankee Group.

“Ten years ago, accessing applications on your cell phone was considered advanced, [but] today, mobile access to enterprise applications is expected,” she explains. “Salesforce.com understands the productivity benefits that come with mobile access and is making Mobile Lite an added benefit of Salesforce CRM.”

Mobile Lite also represents an opportunity to expand the market for AppExchange applications that run in a mobile environment, according to Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research, a firm that specializes in the analysis of CRM offerings. “They’re going to build up demand for mobile apps this way,” he said.