Salesforce Touts Mobile Business App As Sales Rise

Salesforce.com has announced an expansion of its UK presence as it recorded a healthy rise in revenues.

And the cloud-based CRM specialist has also launched a mobile business app that it claims will allow anyone to run their business from their phone.

Business App

The Salesforce1 Mobile App will apparently deliver “the most complete and customisable mobile experience in a single app for business users.”

The app itself (due July) boasts more than 30 features to allow staff to either sell, service, market or engage from any mobile device, providing of course that the device is an iOS or Android handset. It seems that Windows Phone and Blackberry users will have to wait for a dedicated app, but can apparently access the app from their mobile browsers.

The app’s release comes as Comscore research reveals that people spend more time on mobile apps than on desktops. Ovum meanwhile predicts that smartphones are expected to be 77 percent of connected devices in use by 2017.

“The emergence of mobile enterprise applications, which will drive enterprise mobility, create new ways of working and transform existing business processes, is a major trend in 2014. For organisations that already have a mobility strategy in place, the next phase will be to start mobilising as many internal processes as possible to allow workers to perform their core tasks beyond email) from whichever device they have on hand, from wherever they are,” said Richard Absalom, senior analyst at Ovum.

Indeed, new research commissioned by Salesforce.com states that 60 percent of British employees now use apps on mobile devices for work-related activity. Of those that use dedicated department-specific apps, more than 60 percent have seen an increase in their personal productivity as a direct result. And mobile apps can boost UK worker productivity by more than 34 percent

“Apps give employees real-time access to business-critical information no matter where they are, making them more productive and effective,” said Miguel Milano, president, EMEA, Salesforce.com. “The Salesforce1 Mobile App is changing how businesses are harnessing the power of mobile, now anyone can run their business from a phone.”

UK Expansion

Meanwhile the company reported a significant rise in revenues, which prompted it to raise its full-year forecast. Revenues for the first quarter ending 30 April rose an impressive 37 percent to $1.23 billion (£729m) from $892.6 (£530m) million a year earlier.

But there was less good news on the profit side, as the company remained deep in the red after reporting a larger net loss of $96.9 million (£57m), compared with a net loss of $67.7 million (£40.1m) in the same year-ago period.

Salesforce’s chairman and CEO Marc Benioff was of course keen to point to the strong growth figures, and the company also outlined more expansion and investments in the UK. This comes after it announced the opening of a new data centre (the first in EMEA and the company’s sixth worldwide) later this year in Slough.

The company is ‘dramatically’ expanding its UK headquarters and is renaming the Heron Tower in the City of London to the somewhat corny name “Salesforce Tower London”. This will be the company’s largest location outside of the United States. The company also revealed it is the #1 market share leader in the CRM software market in the UK based on total software revenue for 2013 according to Gartner.

“The UK is fundamental to our global strategy and we are excited to announce Salesforce Tower London today; the past decade has brought success and growth for our UK customers and the entire salesforce.com UK ecosystem,” said Milano. “We fully expect that the next year will see salesforce.com build on its positive impact in the UK with Salesforce customers, partners and application developers. We’re particularly excited to announce Salesforce Tower UK today, demonstrating our continued commitment to investment in the UK.”

How well do you know the cloud? Take our quiz!