CIO — All too often, the cries for mobility have come from vendors trying to sell you devices and add-on software. But in today's field sales and support environments, the business drivers to support road warriors are crystal clear. Many of your sales reps work from their home office. And all of your field force is supposed to be at client sites, not sitting at their desks in headquarters.

The good news is that the technology for on-the-road CRM is really here, mature even if not perfect. And the devices that you need to run CRM on are the devices that most of your field force already has: laptops, 3G/4G cards, and a RIM or iPhone device. Remote access to CRM is available almost everywhere it's needed worldwide.

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Of course, the big debate in CRM has been on-premises vs in the cloud. For companies with highly distributed offices (such as branches, franchises, or satellite offices), using Citrix or other remote-desktop solutions can be made to work. But when users are on the road, the latency problems of on premises CRM become insurmountable. Of course, low-end SFA tools can be made to run locally on the users laptop. But provisioning and replication of dozens or hundreds of road-warrior databases is problematic at best. And the situation for mobile devices is basically hopeless.

The SaaS model of CRM avoids all of these problems and makes the user experience on the road absolutely on par with what the user would get at headquarters. Essentially every vendor works just fine with a 3G/4G card and a laptop, and there is no software to provision or support. All of the system customizations are available from the remote machine, and security is maintained (particularly if your admins remember to turn on https mode for the CRM system).

Things get a little dicier when the users go off-network. Salesforce.com and Microsoft (MSFT) (among others) offer offline mode for their CRM systems, allowing users to cache records and access/edit them without a network connection. Perfect for airlines and buildings where network access just cant happen. Replication on reconnect is straightforward, typically following a "last update time wins" pattern. However, offline mode typically will not support all of your system customizations, and some advanced features will not be available at all without network connectivity. Further, the unavailability of documents or records from interfaced-systems (such as accounting or inventory) limits the utility of offline mode to fairly simple record updates.

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