The battle for the small screen

The future of sales is mobile, as a convergence of hardware, software and bandwidth – coupled with an increasingly technologically savvy end user – drives the concept of working in the field to the next level. As a result, the battle for device dominance is red hot.It’s no overnight revolution. Several attempts to push Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms onto handheld devices have failed in the last few years; but now, say the vendors, the stars have aligned and the mobile universe is about to unfold as long predicted.“Certainly the devices have come a long way,” says Mini Peiris, vice president of product marketing for NetSuite, Inc., a vendor of Web-based suite platforms in the form of Software-as-a-Service. Netsuite, like competitor salesforce.com, has quickly established a footprint in the market and proved that smaller is also competitive. “For a long time many phones didn’t have a full (QWERTY) keypad ,” adds Peiris, “but the bandwidth is so much better now, and a real time experience is much more feasible.”Partnering with Antenna Software, ExploreMobile and iEnterprises, the NetSuite applications allow users to run key business processes from their mobiles, such as placing orders, closing transactions and addressing customer issues. The software platform is operating system agnostic and runs on BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Windows Mobile, and Pocket PCs.Small screens for companies of all sizesSuch Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and CRM applications have long been staples of the big vendors who sold to large enterprises. Recently, though, mid-sized and even small companies are getting in on the act.For the most part the top tier vendors had focused on the larger screens of the desktop and laptop, because the instant-read consoles linking to a suite of back end products really couldn’t fit on the tiny real estate offers by most mobile phones.Add in the plethora of operating systems – BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Java – managing mobile devices to integrate with ERP and CRM software was often more trouble than it was worth. End users weren’t always happy with the information they got and what they could actually read or use. As well – given the sluggish data transfer rates which existed until North America’s latent deployment of 3G networks – download times were less than stellar.As such, the initial foray into CRM applications for mobile handsets may have pushed a little too hard, says Reza Soudagar, senior director of CRM solution marketing at ERP vendor SAP.“We ended up dumbing down for mobile devices and at the end of the day there wasn’t a huge uptake because the apps were not super useable,” he says. “So we looked at RIM and what they have done with email and how pervasive they were in the market place.”Instead of going top down with the applications, he says, it was better to go from the bottom up, designing the application around the mobile users’ needs and their device than trying to jam a desktop app into a mobile screen.The result was a partnership with RIM and BlackBerry announced last May. Much of the development work of mobilizing the CRM applications was done by SAP Labs in Montreal, and when it was time for field testing SAP looked no further than its own mobile sales force of 5,000 people.Last May the companies launched a CRM tool which integrates the BlackBerry’s security, management capabilities and efficiency, including address book and calendar applications with SAP’s CRM tool.With the BlackBerry smartphone already well entrenched with a massive user base, the added bonus was that SAP CRM users didn’t need to be trained, since the application was designed around the RIM’s already-familiar user interface, says Soudagar .SAP’s own internal experiment turns out to be a powerful sales tool: Deployment to 100 per cent adoption took only six months, sales executive efficiency increases accounted for 80 per cent of the benefits gain, while calls-to-sales ratios improved 10 per cent, and administrative costs fell five per cent and telecom and related costs fell about four percent.The ROI is realA study from research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) of the roll out suggests an ROI of 454 per cent and payback in 8.6 months. It’s an exercise worth the effort, since IDC also projects mobile users are set to soar to one billion in 2011, about 30.4 per cent of the workforce, up from about 200 million users. At present only about one million are using CRM software on their mobiles.It’s a market opportunity set for growth, says Vinay Nair, IDC Canada’s research manager for the technology group, with CRM applications leading the way.“CRM lends itself more to the nature of the users who have to input their interactions with a client onto a CRM system, so it can be tracked across the enterprise,” he says. “And that’s where we’ll see the growth with other applications – Supply Chain Management probably coming closely after that.”He said SAP and Microsoft Corp have been quick to market with a mobile application that works well on handhelds. “I saw a demo of the SAP application and it is intuitive, just one click, you can contact a client right from email or pull them up,” he says. And that’s important, since the end users won’t adopt anything unless it’s easy to use. Microsoft itself has been a recent entrant into the CRM-ERP application business with its Dynamics offering. Making it easy and familiar for users has been a constant mantra for Microsoft, which has integrated its console into everyday Microsoft tools like Outlook and Explorer. For users, there’s no need to launch a new application on their screens, and it works with their existing Microsoft servers.Taking that one step further to a mobile environment has been the challenge, but Christian Pedersen, senior director of Microsoft’s Dynamic CRM platform, says things are turning around.“We concluded we needed to fit in with the way people actually work in the field with their devices,” he says. “And we also found that one of the reasons mobile didn’t take off was because the applications were too complex for the organization.”Laptops were an obvious and simple solution, but they didn’t always work for those in the field due to size, battery, and connectivity issues. Mobile phones offered better connectivity and better battery life, but a smaller screen.Mobile: the logical extensionThe shift now common across vendors is a strategy to simply treat the mobile as just another device on the network, using a layered application approach to allow that device to be managed and to connect with the database on the servers, he says.“So now Microsoft Dynamics CRM can work on any device, a BlackBerry, Windows Mobile 6, Nokia (Symbian).”The benefits are multiple: IT managers don’t have to worry about configuring each device or about buying only one device for all their mobile workers.Typically it’s based around Outlook or an email program with an interactive capability. One of the assets CRM brings to the table is to be able to track and archive all the communication tools – from IM to email to voice – into a saved file which can be later retrieved and shared with the inside sales team for follow up as needed.Still, when it comes to interaction on a mobile device with its limited screen and form, it’s always best to “keep it simple,” says Pedersen. And that may mean short-hand communication and a lot of forwarding of emails or texts for follow up. Of course, any discussion around smartphones sooner or later comes around to the venerable BlackBerry, and instead of trying to fight it in the same way many manufacturers are battling a PR war with the upstart iPhone, Microsoft figured it would be better to work with it, since it is the dominant device for business in the marketplace.To gain a better foothold with BlackBerry users, last July Microsoft formed an alliance with Ten Digits Software, Inc. out of Vancouver, a well-established pioneer in always-available wireless CRM applications.As a result, Ten Digit’s MobileAccess 4.0, which extends rich client access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM for users of Windows Mobile phones and Research in Motion (RIM)-based BlackBerry mobile phones, has become their flagship product.Sean Gocher, president and CEO of Ten Digits, says over the last decade the company has gained a lot of experience working with different vendors of CRM platforms and it’s that investment in software and back end applications which is now paying off, especially when it comes to the BlackBerry. Ten Digits ace in the hole was an investment in software architecture about six years ago, says Gocher, and the decision to break away from the “down and dirty mobile applications” and to build a ground up system which was secure, flexible and took a metadata approach.The point is that enterprises don’t want to be locked into a single hardware platform, says Gocher. Indeed, many companies are finding that their workers have different needs and wants in a mobile device; some want a camera, others a full keyboard, some need a barcode reader while still others may prefer a MP3 player.Better, he says, to tailor the software’s interaction to allow the device to seamlessly integrate with the CRM platform.“The BlackBerry is the handheld for business users,” says Gocher, citing its security, ease of use and push mail features which have kept it in the forefront in an increasingly competitive marketplace. The key asset in CRM applications though, he says, is push mail, since it keeps the user’s device constantly updated.“The push experience changes the whole sentiment of the users; they’re much more likely to adopt the technology,” says Gocher, since they don’t have to stop and log on and then pull from the database.And while the iPhone has grabbed headlines, it’s still not a complete business solution, says Gocher, despite its ease of use and crisp industrial design.“The keyboard is virtual so it’s not much of a tactile experience – you can’t feel the buttons as you type,” he says, adding it’s not yet capable of remote management by the IT department who can do things like software upgrades on the fly or even a clean wipe should the device get lost. Still, don’t count the iPhone out just yet. NetSuite recently partnered with Apple Computer to port their CRM product to the device and it is making inroads. “It’s like jewellery for executives,” laughs Metin Ozkuzey, CEO/President, DOD Marketing, Inc. A $150 million a year in revenue company in New Jersey which operates five consumer e-commerce destinations, including: www.butterflyphoto.com and www.bestbuyplasma.com “The BlackBerry is a workhorse.”DOD rolled out a full slate of NetSuite offerings including CRM and Supply Chain Management applications tied into through the ecommerce platform to 150 seats, mostly inside sales workers. Ozkuzey says the overall package has brought a 20 per cent savings in operational headcount, but more importantly gives him up to the minute stats.While he still keeps his BlackBerry for everyday and email, his iPhone is with him more and more, especially because the summaries of day sales and inventory and other traffic are accessed through the iPhone’s Safari web browser.“I spend a lot of time on the road and I need those numbers constantly,” he says. “Some of our executive team have given up their BlackBerrys all together for the iPhone.”

The battle for the small screen

News | 08/17/2008 7:50 pm EDT

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