Privately owned Santa Monica, California-based wireless application platform provider Sendia provides the technology to extend existing applications so they can be run on wireless devices such as RIM’s Blackberry, wireless OSes such as the PalmOS, RIM OS, and Windows Mobile, and Intel’s Centrino platform.
Salesforce.com has rebadged the Sendia technology and launched it as AppExchange Mobile, an addition to the existing Salesforce.com AppExchange platform. The key capability is that it enables applications on the AppExchange to be delivered to mobile devices, said Chris Boorman, vice president of marketing at Salesforce.com EMEA.
The on-demand company promises that AppExchange applications will be able to be extended for use on mobile devices without requiring additional development. and that applications written once on the AppExchange platform will be able to run on any mobile device or web-enabled PC, removing the need to develop for one platform and port to others.
For developers it means not having to develop multiple [applications] for different platforms, said Boorman. It removes significant barriers of having to understand different OSes on different mobile devices.
Our customers are eager for ways to extend their on-demand applications to the mobile workforce, and developers need a painless way to address this major opportunity, said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. With AppExchange Mobile, there is no extra coding needed to develop an application on AppExchange and mobile-enable it. AppExchange Mobile is democratizing mobile applications, further extending the power, creativity, and freedom of the on-demand model.
AppExchange Mobile creates a new layer on top of the existing AppExchange infrastructure. There are three elements to the core AppExchange technology. It acts as a development and service delivery environment for native AppExchange applications, a public domain marketplace for AppExchange applications, and a private domain marketplace for customers who want to create their own applications within the development environment for private consumption.
The core AppExchange infrastructure embraces Salesforce.com’s CRM applications and AppExchange applications. It also manages on-demand service delivery, and handles integration services. AppExchange Mobile, the Sendio technology, is layered onto this base technology, providing a mobile server that handles data synchronization, security and encryption, meta data retrieval, an administrative console to manage over-the-air lifecycle management such as upgrades, plus customization capabilities and diagnostics. It is the Mobile layer that communicates with the carrier network that provides the link with individual devices.
Salesforce.com and Sendio have been partners for some time. This time last year Sendio made an updated version of its wireless sales force automation application available to Salesforce.com subscribers and its 79 customers are also Salesforce.com customers. They have worked together to integrate their two technologies at the back end via the Salesforce.com API, to enable the write once, run on multiple platforms capability and enable mobile extensions to be made available simply by pointing and clicking rather than coding. Applications are built to run on the on-demand platform and the Sendia technology takes the core OS calls required to render them on mobile devices, said Boorman.
In theory customers who have created integrations between their in-house applications and Saleforce.com AppExchange can make use of the mobile application extension functionality seamlessly because the Salesforce.com AppExchange acts as an intermediary, meaning the mobile never has to reach directly into external applications. Where customers have created applications with customized user interfaces using non-Salesforce.com user interface entities, some coding will be needed to use the mobile extension.
Salesforce.com paid $15m in cash for Sendia. AppExchange Mobile is available now and is included free of charge for Unlimited Edition subscribers, and costs $50 per user per month for Enterprise and Professional Edition subscribers.
