"One of the things we have announced this week is a piece of middleware which allows any of our Siebel customers or CRM on Demand customers to connect their applications through to their iPad based applications."

"We feel very strongly that people are looking to mobilise ERP as well so we now have full support for the EnterpriseOne product on the iPad," JD Ewards' Schiff said. "We have specific gestures for ERP to make it easy so you don't have to do a bunch of typing on the iPad.

Oracle customer Australian Financial Group (AFG) executive director, Malcolm Watkins, said mobility was an essential part of the white label CRM business it offers its insurance and third party broking firms.

"Mobility is very much one of our key focuses," he said. "...We were already running our own CRM on Demand and now the next step is to take it to the iPad.

"A broker needs to work faster and more efficiently to be able to email [their customers] a password and a log in, start collecting information on a customer, suck it into their [CRM] system, and flick it over to their iPad so [the broker] can sit down with a customer over the iPad, validate the information they are given, then transfer that back to CRM and have it reflected on their iPhones so that when they are on the road they don't have to log back in. "Ultimately where we want to be in the first quarter of next year is having a broker apps so a broker can [access our CRM system]... it's all about this Gen Y connectivity. Mobility is a huge focus for us."