This post was drafted by Andy Baer, SVP, Industries, Communications & Media and Paolo Bergamo, SVP, Product Management, Mobile

We are thrilled to announce Salesforce is coming home from Mobile World Congress with a GSMA 2017 Global Mobile (Glomo) Award! These prestigious awards celebrate the greatest innovations in the mobile industry as judged by independent experts, analysts, journalists, academics and mobile operator representatives. Salesforce for iOS & Android was honored as GSMA’s 2017 “Best Mobile App for Business,” recognizing Salesforce’s leadership in enabling enterprises of all sizes to create, customize and deploy mobile apps rapidly and allow their employees to run their business from their phones.

This award underscores the incredible momentum of Salesforce for iOS & Android, which currently has 1.2 million active users across 150,000 small, medium and large businesses worldwide. Receiving this honor at the largest global meetup of mobile operators, device manufacturers and content owners in the industry, demonstrates the crucial role Salesforce is playing in helping companies engage with their customers in entirely new ways.

What made Salesforce standout from the competition? Salesforce has several unique advantages including:

• It is a mobile platform for business. Salesforce is a cloud platform that democratizes business app development, enabling rapid creation and deployment of any mobile business app, in most cases with clicks, not code. Because Salesforce’s own CRM apps are also readily available on mobile devices via Salesforce for iOS & Android, any configuration or customization changes made to Salesforce CRM apps can be immediately propagated to the mobile app, which enables professionals including sales reps, retail store associates and field service technicians to improve their productivity in the field. And many of the 3,000+ partners in Salesforce’s AppExchange ecosystem are also leveraging Salesforce to allow business users to access their on-platform applications.
• It is scalable and secure. As mentioned above, Salesforce for iOS & Android is used by 1.2 million active business users worldwide, including in heavily regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications, government and healthcare. Salesforce adheres to strict security standards required by regulators, whether it is data loss prevention (DLP), single sign-on (SSO) or secure e-mail client enforcement.
• It is modular and open. Salesforce is built with Salesforce Lightning technology, which features a modular user experience approach, allowing companies to reuse user-interface (UI) widgets across applications and channels, as well as embed external UI widgets as needed (such as embedding a Google Maps widget).
• It can work offline. Business users need to work on their mobile apps in areas where there’s sometimes a lack of connectivity. Salesforce enables users to work offline and sync their data once they get back online.

Thanks again to GSMA for honoring Salesforce with this prestigious award! To learn more about Salesforce for iOS & Android, visit https://www.salesforce.com/solutions/mobile/overview/.