Highrise vs Salesforce

37Signals decided to market a combined package of its key SaaS services for business - 37signals Suite, similar to how Google sells its services as Google Apps. 37signals Suite includes Basecamp (project management system), Highrise (CRM system), Campfire (group chat, which can be used as communication tool in this bundle) and Backpack (group organizer+wiki, which can be considered as an intranet portal in this bundle). The integration between applications in the package doesn't rock for now, but at least the user base will be unified. 37signals Suite is prices so that in most cases it's cheaper to buy the whole suite than two separate services. Price starts at $99 per month - for 35Gb of memory, 35 projects in Basecamp, 20000 contacts in Highrise, 5000 pages in Backpack, 50 simultaneous chats in Campfire. Though it seems much more expensive than the cost of Google Apps (50$/year), but you shouldn't forget that Google charges this fee for each user, and in 37Signals Suite the number of users is unlimited.

Hooray! Marc Benioff bought another cool (and probably very expensive) domain Site.com. Actually, that's all news, because the service for simple site-building launched on this domain - is not new. It's all the same Siteforce tool, previously available in Salesforce's marketing cloud. And, in our opinion, this service is not worth of such domain. We still believe that there is a great demand for simple site-building service. But what Salesforce offers - is nonsense. Of course, the visual editor in Site.com - is very powerful. It's so CSS-oriented and allows to create pages from templates, forms, dynamic pages, pull content from a database, use JavaScript and even publish pages to Facebook. But it's not simple. Rather, it's more suitable for web designer, than for marketer. And why web designer needs this toy, if he can faster create a better site in a code editor?

Salesforce - is if not the trend-setter in the Enterprise, than it's certainly the indicator of most important trends in this sphere. The company had grown on the wave of CRM and SaaS, then came to the front edge of cloud platforms, mobile applications and social software. And now Salesforce wants to occupy two more hot areas - Talent Management and Gamification. The common goal of these technologies - is staff motivation and development. Crazy demand for talent management system has been proven by SuccessFactors, which has set several records in SaaS-implementation and recently was acquired by SAP. And we have already mentioned about Gamification potential. So, today Salesoforce has bought one of the most promising startups in these areas - Rypple (known as Zynga for Enterprise).

Salesforce always used to call its products - the Clouds. Until now, Salesforce had 3 product-clouds: Sales Cloud (CRM system), Service Cloud (customer support system) and the Collaboration Cloud (or Chatter). Today the company is launching the new Social Marketing Cloud. It's a combination of two products: the social media monitor Radian6 and cloud CMS for creating websites Siteforce. We have already told a lot about Radian6. Radian6 was acquired by Saleforce earlier this year and it's customer list includes Dell, GE, Kodak, UPS, etc. Radian6 can monitor social networks for mentioning of your brand, company, products, competitors, analyze public opinion, engage in to social conversations. Integration with Salesforce CRM now allows to use Radian6 to create social profiles in CRM and track the history of social communications, send messages to social networks directly from the CRM interface (watch video).

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff can use any news or events for his marketing purposes. In his latest speeches, Mark is  talking about the well-known social movement Occupy Wall Street. As you know, this demonstration was organized mainly via the social networks, and in particular thank to the Twitter hashtag #OccupyWallStreet. "Look, what social networks can do" - says Benioff - "they can overthrow governments. And they also can easily destroy your business. Ignoring social networks - is ignoring your customers." Benioff has launched his own Twitter hashtag #OccupyTheEnterprise and scares enterprises with it. And from the other hand, he cites the example of using social networks by the Salesforce client  - KLM airlines.

Salesforce seriously decided to become the leading provider of customer support solutions. Its own solution Salesforce Service Cloud is already almost flying to space, but its price is also too cosmic for small business. Therefore, in order to land SMBs, the company decided to buy (for $80 million) the one of the two most popular SaaS Helpdesk services - Assistly (the second - is Zendesk). Assistly fits perfectly into the Salesforce's new Social Enterprise concept. This service allows you to communicate with customers via Twitter, Facebook, client forum, live-chat as well as via traditional channels (email and phone). At the same time support people work in one simple interface. Also, Assistly is known for its original pricing: it's free for one helpdesk agent, and the additional agents can use the service on per-hour based model ($1/hour). So if no requests are coming to support - your company pays nothing for the helpdesk.

We continue to monitor the gamification of business applications. And the first gamified CRM is ... Nitro for Salesforce. This system was presented at the recent Dreamforce 2011 conference and will launch later this month. It's interesting that Nitro for Salesforce is created not by some guys from garage, but by the gamification professionals at Bunchball. For several years, this company is developing games for various projects. Its clients include Warner Brothers, NBC, HP, Comcast, Playboy. However, so far the company developed game mechanics only for consumer projects, and now decided to try its technologies in business application. As it's clear from the title, Nitro for Salesforce - is an add-on for Salesforce CRM.

On Friday nobody wants to read long news. Good video is much better. This is the video that was shown at the opening of the Dreamforce 2011 conference - probably the most glamorous event in the IT-industry. This video marks the focus change of Marc Benioff and his Salesforce. Last eight years the Dreamforce conference started and ended with the word Cloud. Now it changed. Moreover, one of the main news of this year conference was the opportunity for Salesforce customers to store part of their data on a local server, not in the Cloud. And the new main focus for Salesforce is Social Enterprise. Benioff is comparing modern companies with the Arab countries falling under revolutions: "Either CEOs will make their companies social, or customers and employees will depose them like Muammar Gaddafi". So what should a company do to become social?