KDDI and Salesforce.com to Launch Free Trial Service in August
KDDI Corporation, Japan’s leading fixed line and mobile phone service carrier and salesforce.com, the market and technology leader in on-demand CRM, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver on-demand mobile CRM solutions for the Japanese market. Known as “salesforce.com Mobile Edition for au,” the innovative joint offering will deliver comprehensive, wireless CRM functionality that enables users to benefit from their salesforce.com data anywhere, anytime using KDDI’s mobile phones and wireless network. Available to salesforce.com Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition subscribers in Japan, the solution enables users to download data from the salesforce.com service to KDDI phones; view, edit and input new data that can be synchronized with salesforce.com; and search data both offline and online.
The service will be delivered in three phases: It will initially be offered in July, on a complimentary pilot basis to select customers. The pilot will be extended to all salesforce.com Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition customers between August 1 and September 30. The service is then expected to be generally available in October at a cost of JPY 1,575 incl. tax per month, per user.
As part of the partnership, salesforce.com will deliver mobile versions of its applications, in conjunction with KDDI-designed middleware, to run on BREW(R) (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless), Qualcomm’s industry- leading platform for mobile data applications. The middleware enables KDDI phones to communicate with the salesforce.com on-demand service via SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), a high-speed XML-based messaging protocol.
All application middleware was developed by Technoface Corporation, a Japanese joint venture between Hokkaido University and a number of local high- tech-oriented companies.
The joint wireless solution also includes comprehensive security measures designed to safeguard valuable customer data. For instance, if a customer’s phone is lost or stolen, they can call salesforce.com Japan and request the deletion of any salesforce.com data residing on the phone without affecting data housed on the salesforce.com server itself.
“Salesforce.com is very pleased to work with KDDI to deliver its next-generation, on-demand CRM solutions to wireless customers across Japan,” said Jim Steele, president of salesforce.com. “Whether they’re in a train or a subway, in a taxi, or in a customer’s lobby, salesforce.com customers in Japan will be able to have their critical sales data within easy reach. By leveraging the salesforce.com and KDDI solution, salesforce.com users don’t ever have to worry about being out of the loop.”
About KDDI
KDDI is a diversified telecommunication operator formed by the merger of DDI, KDD and IDO in 2000, and is the only domestic company that provides both mobile communication service and broadband service. The number of subscribers to the fixed-line services is approximately 9 million and mobile phone subscribers under the au and TuKa brands is over 23 million. The 69 KDDI group companies had approximately 12,000 staffs and a sale in FY2005/3 was 29,200 billion yen. At KDDI, aggressive improvement of communication environment in preparation for the coming ubiquitous network society is underway and KDDI is aiming to become a “ubiquitous solution company” which provides high value- added solutions. Further information about KDDI can be found on the KDDI website at http://www.kddi.com/english/.
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM). Through its award-winning salesforce.com family of products including Salesforce (http://www.salesforce.com) and Supportforce (http://www.supportforce.com), the company provides a comprehensive suite of CRM applications to help enterprises of all sizes, industries and geographies meet the complex challenge of sharing and managing information on-demand. Salesforce and Supportforce are built on the Sforce client/service integration platform and include the Customforce tool for complete on-demand customization. Sforce (http://www.sforce.com) and Customforce (http://www.customforce.com) allow customers and independent software vendors to customize and integrate salesforce.com’s products, as well as build their own on-demand enterprise applications. As of April 30, 2005, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 15,500 customers and approximately 267,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Automatic Data Processing (ADP), Avis/Budget Rent A Car (Cendant Rental Car Group), Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust Banks.
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