Up until now, hosted customer relationship management pioneer Salesforce.com has made its mark by using its own technology to take on established rivals such as Siebel (now owned by Oracle) and SAP. Unusually for its sector, it has thrived without making a single acquisition.

That makes its forthcoming deal to buy mobile technology maker Sendia a landmark deal for Salesforce. The price tag, of just $15 million in cash, is hardly remarkable. But the deal is noteworthy for the technology that Salesforce has bagged. Essentially, it will allow users to attach to its online service from PDAs, advanced mobile phones and other pocket devices.

For a company that deals in CRM software, the lack of mobile support would have been a huge oversight – legions of road warriors rely on CRM-equipped mobile devices. In fact, Salesforce had struck an alliance with Sendia before acquiring the company.

While that alliance had borne little fruit – fewer than 100 of Salesforce.com’s 20,000-strong customer base were also using Sendia – its strategic importance to the hosted CRM vendor is key. Saleforce executives clearly understood that it would cost too much, and take too long, to perfect its own technology in this area. At the same time, they were aware of the potential of Sendia falling into the hands of a competitor.

“Sendia provides us with a technology enabling the business web to the mobile workforce,” says Chris Boorman, Salesforce’s VP of marketing in Europe. “Users have a one-click capability to mobilise applications from the AppExchange onto any device.” Over 60 of the 200 applications on the AppExchange are mobile-enabled.

As a cross-application technology, the Sendia product will now be rolled into Salesforce’s AppExchange platform, rather than its CRM service. That is a clear indication that Sendia’s importance to Saleforce goes far beyond the low price tag: Salesforce’s management see AppExchange as the core piece to helping the company move beyond CRM to involvement in every application that a business may want to use over the web.