Just a few short years ago, the effectiveness of pushing back-end business applications onto small mobile devices was mediocre, at best. The devices weren’t that powerful. Mobile networks were orders of magnitude slower than LANs. And most attempts at mobilizing traditional business applications tried to replicate a complex PC experience on the ultra-small screen of a handheld device, which went over like a lead balloon.

That situation is turning around. Smart phones are as powerful as PCs. 3G (and forthcoming 4G) mobile WANs are nearly as fast as fixed broadband access networks. Web services are making real-time back-end data available from any Web portal.
And companies such as Antenna Software have figured out how to gather data from multiple back-end systems and display it on tiny devices in digestible, usable nuggets.

At least, that’s been the experience of DIRECTV. The company is using Antenna Software’s Antenna Mobility Platform (AMP) and client software to provide CRM data to its 60-strong sales force, which supports about 7,000 nationwide dealers selling subscriptions to the company’s satellite services. When visiting a dealer, sales reps need up-to-date information from reports such as sales metrics, activation metrics, trending and availability of support tools and promotions, explains Erik Walters, project manager, sales operations, at DIRECTV.

The company has been using Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand hosted service, which allows access to this information from any Web connection. However, the service by itself is PC-centric, attempting to jam a whole PC screen onto the sales forces’ Research In Motion BlackBerry 8700 devices, which proved too complex to use. The Antenna Software client software – which runs on RIM, Symbian, Palm, Microsoft Mobile devices - rolled out as a small-device complement to Siebel CRM On Demand at DIRECTV in January 2007.

“It breaks the On Demand information into categories so the sales force gets real-time information in the best presentation,” Walters says.

Plus, the sales rep can pull multiple reports from a single application, rather than having to piece them together from five to seven locations to bring them to a dealer, only to find out upon arrival that they might already be out of date.
“Our sales force no longer has to prep for two hours a day to visit dealers,” Walter says.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.