Mobile app development moves beyond CRM, but slowly

Everywhere you go these days, people are using BlackBerries to check e-mail and set up appointments. But the march toward everyday use of more complex business applications on smartphones is going slowly at best.

Mobile CRM tools for salespeople have been on the market for several years, and more recently IBM’s Cognos division has adapted business intelligence tools for handheld devices. The innovative form factor of the iPhone is also spurring vendors to think about how applications can be shrunk down for workers on the go.

But the mobile application market is still being held back by small screen sizes and limitations in storage, memory and computing power, according to analysts and vendors. Some applications are simply too complex for today’s mobile devices.

“A lot of business applications that are done in house have to do with analytics,” notes Saswato Das, a spokesman for SAP’s business applications unit. “If you want to run something fairly sophisticated that requires a lot of memory, that requires a lot of computing power, a handheld today is not the best place to do it.”

SAP, therefore, focuses most of its mobile efforts on providing customer relationship management (CRM) tools to sales and marketing people, he says.

Companies like Oracle and IBM are also optimizing their applications for smartphones to satisfy demand from an increasingly mobile workforce. A product called PCNow made by Cisco’s WebEx division even gives smartphone users remote access to their PCs, allowing them to view files and folders from their hard drives and search their desktop computers, all from a BlackBerry or similar device.

Moving beyond CRM

But how much work do users really want to do on a BlackBerry? Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney thinks most workers don’t want their smartphones to be like a second computer. Instead, they want just enough functionality to get by when they are out of the office. Dulaney sees GPS systems as a natural fit for mobile phones. But tasks have to be important and time-sensitive to make people accept the inconvenience of a small keyboard and screen, he says.