Remember the days of Web 1.0 during the boom? Yeah, Cuecats and AOL coasters floppy discs were being handed out in numbers that required Carl Sagan to tabulate. People were not saying “Absolutely!” yet, but they were talking about ramping and leveraging a lot of stuff, including synergy.

Synergy (News - Alert), a situation where two things together become more valuable or useful than the sum of their individual values, is something often discussed but less commonly found. In the sock puppet Web boom what it usually meant was that two VC funded foosball and Aeron chair shops swapped logos on their Web sites, declared partnership and started holding forth on their synergies.

Recently at InnoPath we had the pleasure of being at Oracle OpenWorld – a monster show occupying the fullness of the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, so big that they blocked off Howard Street and set up overflow tents between Moscone North and Moscone South. Larry Ellison (News - Alert) spoke, the Governator spoke (mobile phones are evidently a bit of an issue at the Schwarzenegger house) and in general it was a large, high energy show.

One of the interesting things about the show from a mobile perspective is that for the first time an integration of CRM and device management systems was shown, with a Siebel CRM system integrated with InnoPath’s Care Portal. Like peanut butter and chocolate, these are two great tastes that taste great together and the whole is great than the sum of the parts.

The reason for this is that usually when you call for wireless customer support, the first person you talk to, who will have some sort of CRM system on the screen in front of them, will be able to help you with billing or account issues, but usually not any sort of technical issue. However, with an integration of the sort shown at Oracle (News - Alert) OpenWorld, the CSR, who may in fact know nothing about phones or the minutia of things like what port Google runs their Gmail IMAP4 servers on, can in fact quickly and easily diagnose and fix problems with not only e-mail but also other commonly broken applications such as MMS and WiFi (News - Alert).

Other thing that is often top of mind when dealing with increasingly capable, increasingly business critical smartphones is security. How do you keep data safe? Of course, covering the basics by doing things like mandating password protected lock screens and the like is a first step, but giving front line care the ability to reach out and lock the phone and/or wipe it completely is a good fallback position to have. Indeed, any good security program dictates defense in depth and Lock and Wipe provide a tough- to-breach inner perimeter.

From the subscriber’s view, imagine the poor schmuck who finds his e-mail setting hosed up on his device. He calls support, anticipating a painful, drawn out 40 minute session of “read me this, do that…” coming after one or more transfers and additional waiting in queue is now thrown a surprise. Instead of being bounced around from CSR (News - Alert) to CSR he finds that the first person he talks to can push a button and within seconds his e-mail is fixed. That subscriber has just had a “wow” experience, maybe not insanely great or as good as returning tires at Nordstrom’s but it certainly is a better than expected experience. And that is exactly what Customer Relationship Management aims to do.