Salesforce Chatter vs Jive

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?

Your company still don't use the (free) Chatter? Then Salesforce is coming to you. Today, the company has introduced the new version of this social collaboration tool. The new Chatter absorbed the functionality of the web-conferencing tool DimDim, that Salesforce acquired earlier this year. Now Chatter allows to see the online status of other users, communicate with them in real-time chat and even start screen-sharing sessions. The chat and screen-sharing support the group mode. In addition, Chatter now allows you to collaborate not only internally but also with external users. Now you can create an private group and invite your customers and partners to it.

In the past few days, the hype around Salesforce Chatter overshadows all other Enterprise 2.0 news. And of course, the developers of Chatter's main rival - Yammer have taken the chance to get a share of public attention and reminded Salesforce boss about how all this stuff was started. It started 3 years ago, when at the startup contest Techcrunch50 Yammer team introduced the world's first enterprise microblogging tool. Marc Benioff was the judge there and he expressed his excitement about the new service. And now, 3 years later Salesforce has introduced the Yammer's twin - Chatter.com. However, Yammer developers say that during those 3 years they where busy adding new features and have built much more advanced functionality and market progress. Yammer's progress is really amazing, but now it will be hard for them to compete with FREE Chatter.

Though Salesforce announced free Chatter back in November 2010 and it was officially launched on Feb. 1, 2011, we specifically waited for today when the joint project of Salesforce and Black Eyed Peas has been unveiled. It is a cool example of the beautiful marketing, that becomes an integral part of Enterprise 2.0. To be successful in today's economy every IT business needs to attract attention and, therefore, should become a show business. No one is very excited about the news like "Salesforce partnered with Dell". But the news "Salesforce partnered with Black Eyed Peas" - really attracts attention of potential customers. Nobody wants to look at how Marc Benioff talks about Chatter advantages, but it's very interesting to at him dancing to the Will.I.Am's bit:

Salesforce has acquired the popular SaaS service Manymoon, that is known as the best project management tool for Google Apps. Moreover, since Google Apps Marketplace opening, Manymoon has been the top app there. So, it would be logical is Google bought the service. But Salesforce, that is now aggressively taking on collaboration market, did it first. Obviously, soon the project management functionality will appear in Salesforce Chatter. In addition, for Salesforce this acquisition means getting a connetor to Google Apps. So we can also expect better integration between Chatter and Google services. According to the official Manymoon announcement, the service will continue to exist separately and will not change anything for the free and paid versions. Besides, the developers promise to continue adding new features. They also say that Salesforce will significantly improve the scalability, reliability and security of Manymoon.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, was in good mood during his conference call with financial analysts. First, he boasted that the company's revenues has grown by 30%, and profit - by 100% compared to the previous year, and that in 2012 fiscal year Salesforce expects to set the new great record for a SaaS industry - $2 billion revenue. Secondly, Mark announced that the social collaboration tool Chatter will be available in free edition. Benioff was very proud describing Chatter. This is the most successful Salesforce product in term of annual growth. Since the year after launch, it's used in 60000 companies, that makes it the most popular intranet social network. Among its users - Dell (90 thousand seats), Amazon, Bank of America, Motorola, Siemens and Vodafone. Yahoo! and Nokia use Chatter even not being Salesforce CRM users. And unlike Salesforce CRM users, that get Chatter for free, they pay $15 per user per month.

When Google Apps Marketplace launched, we noticed that Google's partner Salesforce hadn't joined this ecosystem. Now it's clear why. Salesforce is building its own ecosystem of collaborative applications around Chatter. Although Chatter (Facebook for enterprise) is nothing like Google Apps (email + docs), however the aim of both tools is the same - collaboration. At the ChatterExchange presentation, Marc Benioff has clearly stated that Chatter will compete with MS Sharepoint and IBM Lotus Notes (he modestly omitted Google Apps). "Don't be confused that these systems have little in common" - said Benioff, - "the fact that Sharepoint and Lotus Notes were created back in these days when people didn't use Twitter and Facebook and when the top collaborative technologies were email and shared folders".

Finally, the customer service sphere is gaining attention and attracting the leading enterprise vendors. Recently, Salesforce came up with SaaS helpdesk-app Desk.com and now the Social Software champion - Jive - is presenting its own helpdesk solution Jive Customer Service. And of course, it's social, i.e. the front-end of the system is a customer community where users can communicate not only with support agents, but also with other users. And due to the fact that users get answers from experienced customers or find them in the community, the load on the support tems is greatly reduced. In addition to the social component, Jive also partnered with Gamification champion Bunchball to implement game mechanics into the system. It provides different ratings and badges helping to engage customers into the community.

Leading social software vendors Yammer, Jive, NewsGator updated their products and showed us the latest trends, transforming the corporate social networks. Yammer has released the desktop AIR-client (Win and Mac), added the ability to post videos in microblog posts, reward colleagues with badges for completed tasks (we have already seen such gamification in Rypple and Producteev), and realized the integration with NetSuite, reminding the bunch Salesforce + Chatter. NewsGator in its new version of NewsGator Social Sites 2 focused on improving the Sharepoint video capabilities (recall, Newsgator Social Sites works on top of the Sharepoint). Like in Yammer, videos can now be easily inserted into microblog messages and besides they are added to the video gallery (something like YouTube for the Enterprise) where all the social capabilities can also be utilized - comments, rating, likes:

Jive is the champion on the enterprise social software market, and regarding the social functions (creating social connections, customer engagement, integrating the intranet with Facebook and Twitter) - it's the best of breed solution. But document collaboration tools in Jive leave much to be desired. Therefore, Jive is often used as a social layer in combination with Sharepoint or other collaboration solutions. But of course, Jive wants to fill this gap. Today Jive has acquired OffiSync - the document collaboration service. Recall, OffiSync - is a plugin + service, which allows almost real time collaboration on MS Office documents using Google Docs as the synchronization point. Recently, Google has released almost similar (and free) service Google Cloud Connect that could take OffiSync out of the market, so Jive's acquisition - is a great outlet for the start-up. Especially taking into account the price tag - $25-30 million.

Gartner has published the Magic Quadrant for enterprise Social Software market 2010. In the previous similar report in 2009 the MQ reminded the Brownian movement of molecules because of the large number of vendors and approaches to the enterprise social tools. That's why Gartner decided to clarify its approach. At first, they split the Social Software for internal and external. The external was defined as Social CRM - and moved to the separate report. And this Magic Quadrant is focused only on internal social tools, designed for collaboration within enterprise. Additionally in order to mute the noise, Gartner introduced several restrictions. First, each vendor should have at least 100,000 end users. Second, each product should include the following social tools:

At least since the previous year experts are talking about Social CRM, as of the most promising technology on the large CRM market. Now, these talks have the official confirmation - Gartner has published the Social CRM Magic Quadrant (as a rule, such reports are only created for the largest markets). According to the report, 80% of the CRM market growth in 2010 is due to the Social CRM development and the total investments in the social CRM in the next year will reach $1 billion. So what is social CRM? Gartner refers the following technologies to this concept: social Web monitoring, fetching contact information from social media, customer/partner community management, collecting feedback and ideas from customers. According to the report, Social CRM market leaders are Jive SBS and Lithium. Both solutions do not contain traditional CRM functionality, but rather, are designed for integration with traditional CRM. Salesforce, thanks to the release of Chatter, Ideas and acquiring Jigsaw, managed to get only into Visionaries section. Note the absence of startups in the Challengers section - it promises good opportunities for those who will decide to enter this market now.

Social Software adopts consumer web achievements (wikis, blogs, profiles, tags, ratings, social connections, people search, micro-blogging) in the enterprise environment. Of course, today almost all software vendors say that their software provides social computing, but in most cases it's only PR pitches and their software is not really social. At the same time there are few "native social software" solutions, that provide a social layer for company intranet and really enable it to achieve the social software objectives: create enterprise-wide community and improve collaboration. The most successful on this market are 3 solutions: Jive SBS, SocialText and NewsGator Social Sites.

Gartner has presented the second Magic Quadrant report for Enterprise Social Software market. Since last year 3 companies have appeared in the Leaders section, that was empty in the previous report: Microsoft (Sharepoint), IBM (Lotus Connections, Quickr, WebSphere Portal) and Jive Software (SBS). They are challenged  by Atlassian (Confluence) and Open Text that earlier this year unveiled the social module for it's ECM platform - Social Workplace. Not far from it - the main competitor on the ECM market - EMC (Documentum). We also note the stealth appearance in the Magic Quadrant of Google with its revolutionary products Google Wave and Google Buzz. In general, the social software market in the eyes of Gartner analysts still looks like a Brownian motion of unclear vendors.