Cloudforce — the London event being run by Salesforce.com today as a successor to last year's DreamForce Europe event — is starting off with a mobile theme. Today's product announcement from Salesforce.com is a free-of-charge 'Mobile Lite' capability that allows users to access the CRM application and its stablemates from their iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device (more coverage at Techmeme). The objective is to spread mobile usage of Salesforce.com's cloud platform, as the company likes to call its family of applications and services these days.
With more than a million subscribers immediately eligible for the free capability, the feature also shows off the capacity of cloud applications to support incremental functional upgrades. "We have opened up the floodgates for one million subscribers to take advantage of this," the company's CMO Kendall Collins told me a pre-conference briefing last week. "It just feels good to take something that's almost like a new product and say to people, you're getting it for free."
The contrast against on-premise applications is stark, he added, where customers have been facing hikes in maintenance fees while receiving little in return (as my Enterprise Irregulars colleague Vinnie Mirchandani tirelessly points out). "They've been getting more tax, more maintenance, and not a lot of innovation from the traditional software vendors," said Collins. "It's preposterous to raise maintenance when it's difficult for anyone to upgrade to the next software release given all the obstacles."
Also announced today at Cloudforce is the UK release of Ribbit for Salesforce, an innovative application by a Californian startup that was acquired by UK telecoms giant BT last year. Previously available only in the US, its enabling technology and speech-to-text capability has now been localized to the UK, and work is now under way to add support for French, Spanish, German and certain Asian geographies.
Ribbit connects mobile telephony into the Salesforce.com application, instantly converting voicemail and voice messages into text that's attached to contact records, as well as providing a soft-phone capability that allows the sales person's PC to be used as an alternative to their cellphone when it's inaccessible or out of power. One of the big selling points of the application to sales managers is that it means their field sales teams can dictate notes to their salesforce.com account while on the move — for example in transit between appointments — thus keeping the application up-to-date with the latest status. Chris Lindsay, general manager of BT Business applications talks about cutting out "briefcase time" — those valuable hours, and sometimes days on end, when CRM data isn't available because the salesperson hasn't yet entered it.
The selling point to individual sales people is the simple ability to be able to read the contents of voicemail messages within seconds of them coming in, rather than having to wait until a moment when it's possible to phone in and listen to the message. "To me now it's very alien to phone up my voicemail to get my messages and write them down," Lindsay told me earlier today. There may be quite a few salespeople sitting in today's traditional two-hour-long Marc Benioff keynote — as I am at this moment — who wish they could access that capability on their Mobile-Lite equipped iPhones right now.
Good products will support!