Indeed, the wireless CRM products released over the last several months by these and other vendors have been significant drivers propelling Research In Motion's recent growth, according to Mark Guibert, vice president of corporate marketing for the company.

"CRM rises near the top in terms of applications choices that are the next step beyond e-mail," Guibert tells CRM Daily. Some 60 percent of BlackBerry Enterprise customers use their device for applications beyond e-mail, he says.

New Opportunities for Vendors

The opportunities for vendors will only increase going forward, despite the relatively static growth of enterprise software. IDC has identified mobile CRM as accounting for a good portion of the growth expected for mobile and wireless products and services.

By now, some three quarters of North American organizations are at least in the exploratory phase of such projects, the research firm believes. And 25 percent or so of those organizations are deploying a CRM application, with additional companies deploying related applications, such as sales force automation, point of sales applications and industry-specific programs.

Choices To Make

Such an array of choices, though, can be confounding to companies that wish to extend their CRM applications to the PDA or laptop. "Mobile CRM is an interesting and complex ecosystem," IDC analyst Mary Wardley tells CRM Daily.

For starters, she says, a mobile environment is not always an exact replica of the Windows standard or Mac standard. Also, like the on-premise software evaluation process, companies must take into account a whole host of issues besides the actual software application. There is the carrier to consider, as well as hardware and networking factors.

In a way, the decision-making process is very similar to what consumers go through, Wardley says. "The company has to decide what kind of device it wants, who will be the carrier, who will help implement it. Also, the software layer is broken into two pieces -- the application layer and the middleware layer."

In other words, just because a company has, say, PeopleSoft installed in-house, that does not necessarily mean that it will roll out PeopleSoft's mobile application. Ultimately, much depends on the weight the company gives the various moving parts -- software, hardware and carrier -- in the equation. (continued...)

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