Imagine that you're a pharmaceutical sales rep who is on the road, making on average 10 visits to potential customers (physicians) each day. The physicians only grant you a few minutes -- sometimes even just one minute -- to capture their attention toward your products. But you have an even bigger challenge -- in the physician's office or a clinic environment, you can't connect your laptop PC to a network. Given that limitation, you will not be able to use certain software applications for marketing materials or for capturing data if those applications run on a hosted server that you access through a network.

Jeff Wessinger, president, Skura Software Division, points out that Salesforce.com took some components of online offerings and made them available offline, but the offline version is not as robust as the version available when connected to the Internet and is not focused on vertical solutions.

A dramatic advancement in technology over the last 12 months now enables the use of mobile applications without losing any functionality when a laptop is untethered from a network. Now all the capabilities and all of the application code can run while disconnected from any network (similar to a BlackBerry); when the user connects to the network, the code synchronizes all of the information.

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