After a rather intense lead-up, Dreamforce 2011 is finally behind us – and what a show it was! 4 days, 45,000 registered attendees, Metallica, Will.i.am, MC Hammer, Alanis Morissette, Jay Leno, and on and on. This was one of the largest tech shows we've ever seen in terms of numbers, and the energy was amazing.
We unveiled our ongoing message of building the "Mobile Social Enterprise," which focuses on enabling mobile access to social networks. We build Chatter and Facebook/Twitter into so many of our mobile apps that it only makes sense.
This of course matches up well with Salesforce's big unveil of the Social Enterprise. Take a look at Marc Benioff's presentation below to get a true sense for their vision of the future:
Everyone is talking at mobile today, but few people know where to start, or where to turn for help in talking about how to take key business processes to a mobile device. We have been working in and around mobile technology for over four years and have always focused on how cloud and mobility intersect to meet a client needs.
We have made Cross-platform mobile development a core focus so it is possible to have a single code base and have the same application run across multiple form factors on multiple mobile operating systems built by multiple manufacturers. Why is this important? Many companies do not have the luxury of rolling out an application for only one mobile device, they usually need to support multiple devices which can make mobile application development more costly and to increase project risk exponentially.
Before we get into the details of what is supported and how this is possible, here is a brief video that outlines what the 2GO Platform is at the highest level.
True Cross-Platform Customizable Applications
When the iPad was introduced many people labeled it as a device looking for a need. Today it is clearly leading the tablet charge in the Enterprise and has been so successful for Apple it is even taking some marketshare from Apple's laptop sales. However as more tablets come to market, many companies are also looking at Android options to lower costs or at the RIM Playbook.
The platform is optimized for tablets and is designed from the ground up to be used with a touch interface. We now have tablet support for the following customizalbe applications:
Account and Contact Management
Call Planning/Call Reporting
Order Entry
Digital Sales Aid
Route Planning
Field Service
Inventory Management
Bar Code Scanning
Signature Capture
Social Enterprise (Salesforce.com Chatter)
Cloud access even when you can't access the Cloud
What I'm really proud of is the fact that 2GO provides access to back-end cloud data whether or not you have internet connectivity. Even in this day and age there are many places where we don't have connectivity (basements, office buildings, remote customer sites) and still need access to critical business information. Offline synchronization is core to the platform and all information is stored locally in an encrypted database to provide safe and secure access to key information regardless of internet connectivity.
Simplifies Maintenance
Applications rarely are static, business processes evolve and it is a struggle for most mobile applications to keep up with the speed of business. The 2GO Platform helps applications to easily grow and change without any code changes. It leverages something called meta-data (data about data) to make this magic happen. What this means to a business user is when they add a field to a back-end Cloud application, that field is immediately accessible in their 2GO mobile application.
Cross-platform Tablet2GO running on multiple tablets
Here is a brief video that shows the Accounts, Contacts and Social Enterprise modules running on an Apple iPad, a Motorola Xoom and a RIM Playbook.
One of the most popular applications we have delivered is using a tablet as a Digital Sales Aid. Essentially using a tablet as a replacement for a paper brochure, or one-sheet and presenting content about products and services in a very engaging way.
Cross-Platform Digital Sales Aid
Here is an example of the Digital Sales Aid application configured for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) vertical that shows products on a virtual store shelf.
Cross-Platform Tablet2GO on an iPad
Here is a brief video showing how Tablet2GO looks and feels on an iPad
Cross-Platform Tablet2GO on an RIM Playbook (running QNX)
Here is a brief video showing how Tablet2GO looks and feels on a Playbook
Cross-Platform Tablet2GO on a Motorola Xoom (running Honeycomb)
Here is a brief video showing how Tablet2GO looks and feels on a Xoom
The above videos showed 2GO running on a variety of tablets with the same codebase. However we haven't forgotten about the original mobile form-factor, the smartphone. The same codebase is smart enough to know whether or not it is running on a tablet or a smartphone and the user interface is adjusted accordingly.
Here is an example of 2GO running on a Motorola Droid. This is the same application that was shown in the tablet videos, however the interface is optimized for the smartphone (one column of data instead of two, and more of a wizard like interface).
The mobile team is still hard at work and there is more to come. I will keep you posted on our progress as we make a few more announcements in the coming weeks that will make it even easier for you to access these and other 2GO applications and easily roll them out to your organization.
Today we released the results of an independent survey that shed interesting light on how enterprises are using tablets.
The results may surprise you. We hear a lot about how mobile is the next big thing. And from the conversations we have with enterprises, it most often is. But what we’re hearing, and this survey validates, is that we are still in the very early days of using tablets to deliver actual business value.
Most enterprises have tablets purchased by employees who are just “testing them out.” Perhaps using them for work email. Only 22% of companies have “officially” deployed them for business use in some fashion. This may even have occurred in a small department, not necessarily across the company. At the same time 72% know they are used by employees within their companies.
Along the same lines, 78% plan to have tablets officially deployed by the end of 2013, yet only 51% report having an adoption strategy in place.
This means there is a huge opportunity for enterprises to drive innovation with these new devices. The enterprises we talk to with the right mindset may not yet know exactly how to leverage them for business, but they see the potential to differentiate and do things differently. We’ve done some really interesting mobile projects for clients in the consumer goods, insurance and life science industries in particular that are really exciting.
Check out the results for yourself. Does your business have a plan in place to leverage the next generation of mobile devices?
Motorola's Xoom just became publicly available last week, and guess what – we've already got an enterprise app that runs on it! The device's specs are flat out awesome:
Dual-core 1ghz processor
10.1" widescreen HD display
2mp webcam and 5mp camera on back
Android 3.0 Honeycomb
Keeping in mind this device and operating system just came out, it's pretty wild that our application already runs on it, and smoothly at that. The app pictured at the left is our call reporting application designed for field sales reps. They can take this tablet with them, access salesforce.com data while offline, record a visit and even capture signatures for samples left behind.
As more and more tablet devices become available, look for more information on this blog for what we have on each device.
Apple's iPad is the hottest device in the workplace today. According to Computerworld, Medtronic recently purchased 4,500 iPads for employees, and they aren't the only ones. Microstrategy is behaving similarly. Many companies are making the jump early to adopt these devices and putting themselves at an advantage.
Given the iPad's vast consumer and business market acceptance (15 million units sold in 2010 alone), what exactly are companies doing with these devices? Are they more than just a pretty toy?
Join us for a free webinar where our CTO, John Barnes will walk through answers to those questions and more, including how to take salesforce.com Content with you even without an internet connection. If you don't currently have a tablet device strategy in place you don't want to miss this interactive event.
I’ve had an iPhone for quite awhile. Not from the very beginning. I wasn’t in line they day they first went on sale to pay what was it? Something like $600 for it? No, but I had one fairly early on was excited to get early access to the developer program. It was exciting to create one of the first business applications for the AppStore and to be on it the day it launched. The first generation iPhone was a huge step forward from my current Smartphone at the time, an HTC something or other from T-mobile that ran Windows Mobile 5.
Looking back I’ve always been an early Smartphone fan. I had my first one, a Palm Treo 180 almost 10 years ago. It was basically a monochrome Palm Pilot with a phone app on it and a very delicate hinged earpiece that did eventually die. I upgraded to the newer Treo, this one was in COLOR! But it had the same hinge issue and despite my best efforts, it eventually quit working too. I think I then tried an early version of the Sidekick. I liked that it was unique, but didn’t appreciate how closed the platform was. I couldn’t just install other Palm apps like I could on my Treo’s. I got a Sidekick 2 and liked the new features, but it still fell short and at some point I moved over to Windows Mobile. With Windows Mobile I liked the openness, but the interface was terrible, going into the Task Manager to kill runaway processes, etc… So I was excited when Model Metrics got into the iPhone fray early on and I was able to expense an iPhone.
Looking back it was the first time I had a Smartphone without a physical keyboard. I think in my mind that is why I gravitated towards the Smartphone was because I wanted to use them for email and liked the idea of a full keyboard. I grumbled along with everyone else saying, “It’s not as fast for email as a Blackberry, but you get used to it”. I didn’t upgrade to the 3G model when it later launched, but did get a 3GS when they hit the street as my first gen was getting long in the tooth and I liked the idea of a faster processor.
Now we are doing development of mobile applications across several platforms and one of those is Android. We have some test Nexus 1 phones in the office that are used for development and testing. I liked a few things about them, but found the trackball and general approach fairly primitive when compared to the iPhone I was used to. I appreciated the idea of Android (open source, multiple manufacturers, runs Flash, supports Adobe AIR), but I kept wondering in the back of my mind how it would really feel to try using it as a primary phone?
Gradually other phones have made their way into our company. Some had the first generation Droid, others some of the newer Android models from HTC or Samsung. It wasn’t until I was at the Adobe MAX conference in October and was given a Droid2 along with thousands of other developers that I truly thought about leaving the iPhone fold. I played with the Droid, connected my Google account and tried downloading a few applications. Everyone asked what I thought about it and I realized I couldn’t really say unless I tried it as my primary phone. So I just made the switch (which was surprisingly painful), not because of Android, but involved the procedures of moving off the company AT&T plan, to a personal plan, to a personal Verizon plan and then back to the company Verizon plan just to keep my number. Tune in for my next blog where I’ll break out my thoughts after going Android and how it compared to my iPhone.
Dreamforce this year was similar to past shows: exciting, a source of breaking news, and unbridled energy. But the scale of this year's show really set it apart from the past. As we understand it, there were nearly 28,000 attendees, an increase of nearly 50% on the year before. To say Salesforce is on a roll would be quite the understatement.
This year Dreamforce focused heavily on what it calls Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2, representing the transition all of us are making from desktop or laptop computing to mobile computing. Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris made special note of this during the keynote, giving us a shout-out in the process for our dedication to mobile development:
Dreamforce this year also saw 2 other major announcements regarding database.com and Chatter.
Chatter of course launched earlier to much fanfare as the first enterprise social network. Promising to improve collaboration and reduce email traffic, Chatter was already a success. The announcement at Dreamforce that Chatter is now free to all Salesforce customers will only serve to make the service more sticky.
Database.com represents the next logical step for salesforce.com as a true infrastructure-as-a-service offering, bringing a cloud-based database to the masses. Since it is salesforce.com's database, it is already one of the largest enterprise databases with more than 20 billion records and an astounding 25 billion transactions per quarter.
Everything seems to be going mobile, and IT is scrambling. Yesterday’s policies aren’t cutting it when company executives buy the latest-whiz-bang-mobile-gadget-bling and then want to read their company email on it, and other employees soon follow.
Traditionally companies had one supported device, the RIM Blackberry. We all know it still has the dominant business market share, but Apple has made huge gains over the last couple of years and now Android devices are coming on strong and overtaking Apple. The waters are further muddied by tablets (iPad today, Android tablets tomorrow) and how IT will support, condone and manage them.
Some companies have moved towards a “employee liable” approach allowing individuals to bring their own device in an attempt to save $300-$400 a device. However this can become a support nightmare and most companies find it cheaper in the long run to provide a few devices that they can more easily manage and support. Saving a few hundred bucks can cause more support headaches than it’s worth.
So where do we go from here? Several companies are emerging to provide device management support. But what is the inflection point to move towards a solution like this?
Security – For regulated industries such as Life Sciences, Pharma and Financial Services security is a must
Pain – Once you move above 200 devices the support pain can get too much
Cost Management – To contain roaming charges and data overages
Application Management – Apps are proliferating and need management
There are options from vendors such as Zenprise, AirWatch, Mobile Iron and iPass to help with some or many of these needs.
At a recent conference I heard stories of people seeing a $1,500 iPad bill for data overages (most likely due to Netflix), or surprised by roaming charges when travelling.
I’d recommend that IT departments get in front of this quickly and create and update their device policies and management systems to get ready for the continued tsunami of mobile devices and tablets headed their way.
As pretty much anybody who has a pulse already knows, BlackBerry has released their latest technological marvel, the PlayBook tablet. Initially, it appears to be a direct competitor to the iPad, which as far as we're concerned is a good thing. Competition breeding innovation and all.
But what really excites us is that this new tablet device runs Adobe AIR, which our 2GO platform and applications are built to run on. Sweet! Now our customers have a true choice in the marketplace when they want mobile access to salesforce data, content, and so much more.
Now to the fun stuff, a video demo of the PlayBook in action:
Just yesterday, Engadget covered stories coming from both Gartner and IDC, two of the preeminent research and analysis firms in the country. Both agree that Android has exploded on the market, moving from a 9.6% market share last quarter to 17.2% market share currently.
Google’s grand vision of running multiple devices across multiple carriers is coming to fruition, as the Android devices have eclipsed Apple’s IOS in sales.
Mobile devices have been one of the industries that in spite of significant economic headwinds have continued explosive growth, especially smart phones. This is a big part of why Model Metrics develops so much for the mobile market – field workers in every industry are demanding remote access, and we’re more than happy to help.
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