Salesforce Chatter

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".

First of all, 2010 will be the year when Microsoft becomes a strong Enterprise 2.0 market player. This year Microsoft will launch the commercial versions of online MS Office, Sharepoint 2010 with web 2.0 features and Windows Azure cloud platform, and these products will of course push ahead SaaS and enterprise Social Software technologies. Besides, we expect revolutions in mobile enterprise technologies and VoIP sphere.

Strange, but Salesforce, that always used to be in the forefront of the Enterprise 2.0 trends, still didn't have internal social tools (only the link the outside Social Web by means of Service Cloud 2.0). Therefore, in order not to loose its authority, the company decided not just add an internal social network to its CRM software, but also create a social platform for all applications developed on Force.com. The new product was called Salesforce Chatter, and if you look at the new menu on Salesforce.com, Chatter is on the same level with Salesforce CRM and Force.com. So for Salesforce it's not just a new feature but a strategic product. How it works?