Salesforce is known for continually updating its products, launching new features and versions throughout a given year. So it makes sense that three moths after launching the company’s foray into social collaboration, Chatter, to the public, Salesforce is already releasing a new version. Today, Salesforce is launching Chatter 2, what it calls the “next generation of social collaboration technology.” The new version will be available in October, says the company.
Salesforce Chatter, which was originally announced last November, was launched into public beta in June after four months in private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform’s firts three months open to the public, Chatter has been adopted by 20,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce’s client base using the platform. → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. In it, he responds to critics of his last guest post arguing that enterprise software should be more like Facebook.
Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting.
Frankly, I’ve been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka “the ruckus across the blogoshere,” as Joe McKendrick calls it). It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever. Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever. It will create more value for users, customers, and vendors by an order of magnitude over what we saw in the last wave. And, it’s really starting to happen right now. It is realtime. It is social. It is mobile. And, it is about time. Literally, it is about productivity. → Read More
Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting.
Frankly, I’ve been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka “the ruckus across the blogoshere,” as Joe McKendrick calls it). It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever. Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever.
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. → Read More
Salesforce’s enterprise friendly social collaboration platform Chatter was announced at last year’s November Realtime CrunchUp with much fanfare. To many, there is no doubt that Chatter will have a lasting impact on the enterprise and cloud computing. Following Salesforce’s debut of Chatter, over 67,000 Salesforce customers requested to be private beta testers of the realtime collaboration platform. Today, a lucky 100 large and small businesses, including Reed Exhibitions, Schumacher Group, and TransUnion, will begin to use Salesforce Chatter as the platform enters private beta.
Salesforce says that private beta participants were chosen based on their existing Salesforce.com technology deployments and potential Chatter use cases. Chatter itself as a platform has much of the same functionality as when the platform first debuted. One addition is the integration of Chatter to Saleforce’s iPhone and BlackBerry apps, allowing users to tap into Chatter’s realtime stream on the go. Chatter will be integrated into the new Salesforce homepage along with a dashboard of reports and approvals, workflow, tasks and calendar. You’ll also be able to see filters as well. Chatter will let you see updates from people, files, applications, HR, and will integrate other feeds (Dow Jones, Thompson Reuters). → Read More
Marc Benioff commented on Facebook about Erick Schonfeld’s list of important technologies of the coming year, pleased that Erick thought Salesforce Chatter was going to be a big deal. I agree: Chatter is likely to become a key differentiator in the contest for momentum in cloud computing. Up until now, Twitter and Facebook have had the game all to themselves, with Google content to experiment with Wave and Microsoft busy launching Azure. Chatter will inevitably go right at the heart of Microsoft’s Sharepoint strategy, which has some serious legs now that the company has wired Visual Studio up to it on the development front and Silverlight on the display side. With Windows Mobile 2010 and Silverlight Mobile still officially unannounced, Chatter has an interesting opportunity for the next three months or so to slipstream alongside Nexus One and Android. This gives Benioff plenty of red meat on the marketing front, but behind the scenes the real target is Twitter. Chatter was pitched as a Facebook clone, and the more Facebook tweaks their status model the more it begins to look like FriendFeed on steroids. By tagging me in his Erick status update, I received not only Marc’s message but the replies of others in an email thread which pointed me back to a FriendFeedy conversation thread. So far Twitter has resisted harnessing its reply_id capability for conversations, leaving the field wide open for third party clients to (so far) pick up the ball. Robert Scoble was promoting one FriendFeed killer the other day that might go there with a promised UI overhaul, but my bet is on Facebook morphing quicker. So now we get Facebook and Facebook Connect operating as a stalking horse for establishing an identity map that Chatter can do a LinkedIn party on. For each civilian identity, Chatter offers an extended professional identity with tools to cross-index among enterprises and their internal taxonomies. It’s like taking Twitter lists and harnessing them across affinity groups inside and across companies, leaving Twitter and its clients to carving up the customer end of the transactions. But guess where the carrots lie for those customers? The MinorityReport location-aware enterprises that have realtime deals just waiting to be pitched to those who register for stream offers. CRM is the logical clearing house for these relationships, as long as care is taken to establish trust and authenticity at the intersection of public and → Read More
Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twitter is choking FriendFeed to death.
What’s odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its user’s data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP?
So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data. That, of course, means Facebook has to go along with it. Playing ball with Twitter command and control doesn’t make sense unless Facebook likes the idea of doing the same thing with “their” own stream. Well, maybe so. That leaves two obvious alternatives. → Read More
