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As we saw last year, there’s been a massive wave of Fortune 500 companies adopting touch-based tablets and devices. One result of that has been the proliferation of a whole range of B2B iPad and smartphone apps from companies like us and salesforce.com to enable those mobile, touch-powered professionals with the intelligence and data they need to understand and engage their customers, as well as open up new opportunities.

However, there’s a second big enterprise trend that’s picking up momentum as well: that of large companies who are developing internal enterprise apps for touch-based tablets and devices, for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.

And because it’s a need that more and more of our customers are requesting every day, we’re very excited to announce this morning the launch of FirstRain for Touch, a new, powerful and yet easy way to drop highly relevant customer intelligence for your sales and marketing teams into your enterprise iPad app—and the first enterprise customer intelligence solution built for the Salesforce Touch Platform.

Last fall, at their annual Dreamforce ‘12 conference, along with their high profile launch of Salesforce Touch, salesforce.com also announced the launch of the similarly named (but very different) “Salesforce Touch Platform.” And unlike Salesforce Touch—which is a downloadable app for iPad, iPhone and Android created for their users to easily access salesforce.com data and capabilities on their devices—the Salesforce Touch Platform is a Software Developer’s Kit that developers within a large enterprise can use to create their own, internal touch-device apps for their sales and marketing teams.

Our new FirstRain for Touch solution is an elegant and personalized set of components that have been optimized for use on touch-based devices, and can be easily dropped into enterprise apps created by companies, just like those developed using the Salesforce Touch Platform SDK. And the demand has been notable. For example, we have at least 3 large, current customers (all in the Fortune 500) who are each planning or have already created and deployed their own iPad apps for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.

But perhaps one of the nicest aspects of this launch has been the opportunity to work with the great folks at salesforce.com. We have lots of clients in common and solutions that have always been highly symbiotic, and so this area is just one more place where we find common opportunity to help each other succeed. Our thanks to Clarence So, their Executive Vice President of Mobile Strategy, for his kind comments about our release: “It is exciting to see the rapid innovation that partners such as FirstRain are delivering on our trusted mobile platform, FirstRain for Touch will provide customers with the right intelligence to help them connect with their customers in entirely new ways and accelerate business success.”

If you’re interested in more information about FirstRain for Touch, let us know!

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