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Oracle and Salesforce.com might be your ticket to a free iPhone?
How? Make your boss pay for it.
Oracle, the enterprise application giant, and Salesforce.com, the CRM hotshot, are among the first to build apps for the 3G iPhone due July 11.
Oracle’s Business Indicators applications on the iPhone will deliver the metrics from a handful of Oracle BI apps. From InformationWeek: “Finance, sales, and manufacturing managers can get alerts and updates based on predefined business metrics, such as if sales goals are met or shipment levels dip.” Screenshots on ZDnet.
Existing Salesforce Unlimited Edition customers can now download Salesforce Mobile to the iPhone for free.
And the entire universe of Force.com applications is available too. According to Saleforce.com, the Apple “SDK has enabled salesforce.com to build a mobile application that will enable new native Force.com applications as well as the 72,000 existing custom-built Force.com applications to be quickly and easily deployed to the iPhone.”
There’s also MySpace, MLB.com, PayPal and Facebook apps to play with.
Your boss may still think the iPhone is a toy. The IT department may dread managing a new product, especially if iTunes is the management console. But the populace of the enterprise will be using the iPhone. Oracle and Salesforce.com know it now. In fact, they’ll make sure of it. The rest of the vendors are not far behind.
SAP thought it had a coup this spring loading SAP CRM onto the BlackBerry. It probably did. But it had better consider the iPhone.
What an opportunity to make the pitch that your team needs to be outfitted with the hip hardware or be left in the dust by your competitors.