Wireless SFA.

Wireless SFA 

Sendia

3420 Ocean Park Blvd., Ste. 3080

Santa Monica, CA 90405

Ph: 310-752-7000; Fax: [phone]

Web: www.sendia.com

Price: The annual list price for the Hosted Edition of Wireless SFA is $400 to $600 per user, depending on the volume of users and desired functionality.

Blackberries are very popular today because of their excellent wireless e-mail support. The ability to instantly send and receive e-mail in near real time is a killer feature for those individuals who need to be in constant e-mail availability, especially sales people. What if you could leverage these popular devices to allow instant access to your CRM database? How many times have you or your employees been on the road and needed to look up a customer's phone number, but you didn't have immediate access to this information?

Sendia's Wireless SFA (sales force automation) adds wireless access to your contact manager running on a RIM device. The Sendia application also runs on Palm devices such as the Treo 650 (shown in Figure 1). We tested a specific Sendia application that works with the hosted Salesforce.com SFA application. It's called Sendia Wireless SFA for Salesforce.com.

According to Sendia: "Our mission in life is to make wireless work flawlessly for the business user. For salesforce.com, we've developed a mobile application that 'mobilizes' the salesforce.com application and provides users with a very productive and satisfying user experience."

On a related note, people have had to overcome a lot of issues with past deployments using a browser application. In these browser-based applications, users are subjected to spotty, unreliable wireless coverage, and they must wait for the browser to return data. Sendia developed a native application on the device (it uses ~200KB) that communicates to the server asynchronously in the background, so the user is not involved with the communications process. Sendia will "pre-cache" a pre-specified number of contact records so, even if you lose wireless connectivity, you can still view contact information. If you need to look up a contact that is not in the "pre-cache," and if you have wireless connectivity, you can pull contact records down wirelessly. You set up a mobile profile, or role-based subset (filter), to determine which records to pull down to your Blackberry device. For instance, you can query all opportunities that are closing in the next 60 days.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Further, and most important, from your Blackberry device you can make record changes, enter notes, etc., and this information is wirelessly synced with the salesforce.com database. Essentially, Sendia's Intelligent Client environment is always resident and always collaborating with the server to keep the local SQL Engine data mirror up to date. If the user enters new data, the information is sent immediately upstream (network status permitting). Data received from the server are stored in the SQL Engine and become immediately available to the user's application. Error detection and correction are transparent and automatic.

How The Server Works

The Sendia Server gathers data from back-end application data repositories and applies intelligent filters to determine what data should be resident on each user's mobile device. You can, if you wish, create a large record set to download to your device. The only limitation is the amount of memory on the device itself; with enough memory, you can contain all of your contacts and simply use the wireless connectivity to synchronize changes, such as added notes.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

After defining your filters, the server then collaborates with the Intelligent Client to maintain a SQL Engine mirror of the individual user's data on the client, using a companion AES-encrypted data transport. If anything changes on either end, the change is immediately propagated with field-level granularity to maintain synchronization. If the network is not available to make the transfer, a queue is established until the network returns. Collision resolution rules are applied at the server. Errors are detected and corrected according to a multiphase commit protocol.

Provisioning your wireless device to work with Sendia is a no-brainer. We tested installation of the Sendia application onto a Blackberry device. After registering on Sendia's Web site, we received an e-mail containing a Web URL that was clickable. After clicking on the link and following various prompts, we were able to download the application to the Blackberry. From the Blackberry, we entered a specific Web address, then downloaded and installed the application.

The key is that it is a native RIM OS application (not browser-based). It operates similar to your Blackberry e-mail (no need to care about communication details). Essentially, the application accesses a local database on the device and synchronizes any data changes to the Sendia hosted server. When you search for a contact, the search is performed on the database contained on the Blackberry. Only when you perform a search for records not in the local database is a request made to the Sendia server to pull down the records. It's important to note that when searching and attempting to pull down records remotely, you don't have to wait while the search and download of the results take place; you can continue to use the Blackberry, and you will be notified when your search results are ready.

Sendia has excellent security controls built in. For instance, one nice feature is that the administrator can set a timer for the duration of a session, after which it automatically logs off the user once a period of inactivity takes place. Another important feature is that users can remotely "lock" the application, erase the data or remotely uninstall the application. Considering how easy it is to lose small devices such as PDAs or Blackberries, this is a critical security feature.

There are a few key usability features that we particularly liked. First, you can e-mail directly from Contacts & Leads. You have access to both your RIM and salesforce.com contacts when e-mailing, and you do not need to exit the Wireless SFA application to send an e-mail. A drop-down menu allows you to e-mail from within any category without exiting the app. We liked the clean interface of the Sendia application, which was also very easy to navigate using the Blackberry scroll-wheel to pop up a menu as well as sub-menus (see Figure 2). Finally, from the application, you can perform automatic phone dialing from your contacts.

Conclusion

TMC Labs was very impressed with the Sendia solution. With the popularity of Blackberry devices as e-mail access devices, the Sendia application is a perfect complement to add contact management capabilities to these devices. The Sendia application is the perfect solution because of its elegant design, simple installation and ease-of-use. And most important, it just plain works--even in intermittent wireless network coverage environments.

RATINGS (0-5)

Installation: 5

Documentation: N/A

Features: 5

GUI: 5

Overall: A

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