Social customer relationship management (CRM) company Nimble (News - Alert) has hired former Salesforce director Jason McDowall as part of its preparation to launch a new mobile app.

McDowall, a recognized expert in mobile software development, headed Salesforce.com's (News - Alert) team that developed Chatter Mobile, which was selected by Apple as a top business app of 2011.

Santa Monica-based Nimble said that McDowall will lead the expansion of its platform and mobile strategy.

"While Jason will have broad responsibility for product at Nimble, one of the first initiatives will be to deliver Nimble Mobile," said Gilles Marchand, Co-founder & VP, Product of Nimble.

Nimble's backers include Google Ventures, Mark Cuban, and Jason Calacanis.

McDowall has experience in enterprise software development as well as Software as a Service (SaaS).

"2012 will see a dramatic expansion of business change that is being driven by the social customer, empowered employees, and a convergence of new technical capabilities," said Michael Fauscette, group vice president of Software Business Solutions, IDC. "Cloud and mobile are two of the key technologies enabling businesses to respond to this change, and Nimble's flexible mobile initiative to extend their current cloud-based social business platform gives the solution a well-rounded and complete mobile offering.”

McDowall said companies have to balance the needs and expectations of customers with the speed of implementation.

"We are inspired by the mobile offering from LinkedIn (News - Alert), which is a beautiful blend of great user experience with native and web technologies. At Nimble we seek to provide the most compelling mobile CRM by leveraging a similar mix of technologies,” he added.

Nimble is foreseeing brighter days ahead, because analyst firm Gartner (News - Alert) says the Social CRM market will exceed $1 billion worldwide by 2013 as small businesses are looking for ways to optimize social networking for their business needs.

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