Mobile CRM set to boom

Mobile CRM will exceed traditional CRM growth rates and account for 20 per cent by 2010 as the market matures, according to a new report from research firm Visiongain.

The burgeoning market should reach "reasonably robust" global status by 2007. Up till now the market accounted for less than 10 percent of total CRM revenues, according to the study.

"Making CRM available to employees who spend most of their day outside the office is one more incremental improvement to the system," states Marcia Kaplan, telecom industry analyst at visiongain and author of the report, in the executive summary. "It is not a radical idea, but it has encountered a good deal of ambivalence. In 2001, extending enterprise applications to a wireless environment was touted as the 'next big thing' and nothing happened. At that time, security, usability problems with handheld devices, and costs were the major impediments."

“But companies welcomed handheld devices into the corporate world and email pushed to wireless devices became the first killer wireless application," Kaplan added. "After investing in the necessary technology and outfitting their field personnel with mobile devices, businesses are looking to maximise their investment and mobile CRM [as] the next rational step."

But the company warned that complexity makes partnerships crucial in the mobile market. Typically a mobile CRM implementation involves a software vendor, a middleware vendor, possibly a systems integrator, a device manufacturer and a wireless operator.

Kaplan added that the market in the US will be considerably larger than the European market, which is slower to adopt handheld device solutions for enterprise applications." Traditional CRM vendors, including Onyx, SAP, and Siebel, have entered the mobile CRM space.