Salesforce.com buys Sendia and goes mobile

The long-heralded promise of wireless access to enterprise applications got a boost last week when Salesforce.com announced the acquisition of wireless infrastructure provider Sendia and the launch of AppExchange Mobile using Sendia’s technology.

Leveraging its $15 million purchase of Sendia, Salesforce.com customers will eventually be able to access any AppExchange application on most mobile devices. The new platform could juice up the sluggish pace of mobile application migration for countless vendors, experts said.

Of 209 current AppExchange applications available, 60 are mobile-ready today, according to Salesforce.com’s Web site. AppExchange Mobile could better that by spawning mobile versions of core applications, said Sheryl Kingston of the Yankee Group.

Enterprises want to give employees ubiquitous access to enterprise applications, even if they’re wary of the cost and complexity of moving to mobile platforms, Kingston said.

At the launch last week, Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff, touted the “write once, run anywhere” mantra for AppExchange application developers.

But there is still heavy lifting to do moving applications to mobile devices, said Alex Klyce, a senior vice president at Salesforce.com. It takes from three to four months to take an AppExchange application and design it for any one particular mobile device, Klyce told InfoWorld.

Neither Klyce nor Benioff could say how custom applications would fare on a low-powered handsets or handheld computers. Nevertheless, industry analysts were excited about the possibilities.

“It is (a) new platform and a new way to build applications that might not have been conceived before,” said Denis Pombriant, of Beagle Research.