With mobile devices and broadband wireless coverage now nearly ubiquitous, mobile business applications are well within the grasp of most organizations. In fact, almost 95 percent of enterprises are currently using some form of mobile data applications, according to technology market research firm In-Stat.

Pitney Bowes saw the value in business-specific mobile applications early on. Not long after Pitney Bowes deployed Siebel (now Oracle Siebel) customer relationship management (CRM) software in 2003, it realized that putting that information, along with ERP data from its SAP system, into the hands of its field service techs could not only improve customer service, but also make those techs' jobs easier.

Prior to 2003, Pitney techs had reach out to warehouse staff to get parts availability information. And those same field workers, particularly the ones who stayed on a single customer site, rarely got to compare best practices with others, to see if a customer issue was widespread.

Paul Weston, Pitney's VP of CRM systems, decided to deliver CRM and ERP information to techs' handhelds via Antenna Software's Antenna Mobile Platform (AMP) and its AMPower Service application. AMP's software interacts with corporate systems and manages transactions between those systems and mobile devices. Antenna also offers an application framework and a set of its own mobile applications, like AMPower Service.

"[Today] our guys riding around in vans, they can't work without [the application]," Weston says, "It's how they get their days' work. When they finish a job and want to know where they're going next, they get that location from their mobile devices."

Pitney first rolled out the AMPower Service application in the United States in 2003 to about 500 on-site service representatives to pilot test the app. A year later, the company launched another set of pilot programs of 100 or so users, and added 300 more participants every week, until the remaining 1500 remote service folks were equipped.

Pitney now has some 2,000 field workers in the United States using AMPower Service. Another 700 staffers got the application in Europe in late 2005, and 500 more in Canada started using it in late 2007, according to Weston.