April 11, 2006

Salesforce.com Gets Sendia, Mobile AppExchange

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Hosted CRM vendor Salesforce.com has announced what company officials are claiming as “the next generation of mobile applications with AppExchange Mobile,” through the acquisition of Sendia Corporation for $15 million in cash.

The combination of the AppExchange on-demand platform with mobile technology from Sendia will, in Salesforce.com’s vision, “mobile-enable more than 60 on-demand applications that are currently available on the AppExchange.”

Using AppExchange Mobile, all current and future AppExchange partners will be able to extend their on-demand applications to any mobile device with what Salesforce.com officials say is “no extra development cost or complexity.”

Today ISVs and developers have to develop applications across multiple platforms and multiple operating systems for use with multiple carriers, causing extended development, testing and QA cycles. AppExchange Mobile is an effort to give developers a new model – developers can write an application once on the AppExchange on-demand platform and have it run on any mobile device, as well as any Web-enabled PC, without additional coding.

Almost exactly a year ago Sendia announced today its release of Wireless SFA 2.0, the company's product that allows for the use of the enormously popular Salesforce.com on handheld devices such as the BlackBerry and Treo smartphones, as reported by TMC’s Tracey Schelmetic:

“Version 2.0 was built with deeper integration between the contacts on the various devices and Salesforce.com's contacts, allowing more seamless instant messaging and e-mailing to contacts stored in both places. The company also polished the way the sales activity alerts are delivered, allowing for more customization for different users.”

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com said with AppExchange Mobile, there is “no extra coding needed to develop an application on AppExchange and mobile-enable it.”

Sendia President and COO Alex Klyce has been named senior vice president and general manager of the AppExchange Mobile Business Unit for salesforce.com (News - Alert).

The AppExchange Mobile platform provides features for mobile development including over-the-air management, data transfer and support for a wide variety of handheld devices such as RIM's BlackBerry, and wireless operating systems and platforms including Intel's Centrino, PalmOS, RIM OS and Windows Mobile (beta).

Sendia is based in Santa Monica, California and has 35 employees. All of Sendia's 79 customers are salesforce.com customers as well.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

(source: http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2006/04/11/1560331.htm)