iPhone BI
July 20, 2008
Business intelligence is coming to the iPhone, the mobile device that delights those with tiny fingers and a youthful love of multi-function gizmos. Cliff Saran’s “Oracle and Salesforce Develop iPhone Business Apps”, published on July 11, 2008, pulled two announcements together that I had overlooked. One of my engineers has an iPhone, and I watch him surf the Web, make the occasional call, and send misspelled SMS messages to me about projects’ status. You can read Mr. Saran’s interesting article here.
Mr. Saran identifies two companies pushing into what is for me a territory near the BlackBerry frontier. First, he describes Oracle’s Business Indictors. The id4ea is that a hip CFO will use her iPhone to “to view the latest company financial trends and enables sales managers to receive alerts on sales performance and customer satisfaction issues.” You can learn more about Business Indicators here but the Oracle Web site is a sometimes snail-like machine. Be patient.
He also describes Salesforce Mobile for the iPhone. This application “allows Salesforce users to view and edit records (accounts, opportunities), log sales or service activities such as e-mails, phone calls, and in-person meetings, and assign tasks and events to colleagues.” More about SMiP is here.
From my vantage point in rural Kentucky, it is too soon for me to make a call about the iPhone’s ability to gain a foothold in the enterprise. But my engineer is, as he says, “likin’ it”. Also, I want to see how the Apple and Google mobile initiatives interact. Could a showdown be coming between Apple and Google with Research in Motion relegated to the scrub team?
Stephen Arnold, July 20, 2008
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