Last September, Salesforce bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly for $50 million-plus to help expand its service cloud offerings to small businesses. Today, Salesforce is debuting a brand new Assistly-inspired social and mobile customer service platform for small businesses, called Desk.com.

As you may remember, Assistly helped companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more.

Desk.com includes much of the same help desk functionality as Assistly but with a few changes. As Assistly co-founder and vice president and general manager, Desk.com, Alex Bard and explains, the customer service platform has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, including the infrastructure and back-end. There’s a new user interface, new APIs, a new HTML5 mobile client, and a new reporting service. Additionally, Desk.com is launching with an in-depth integration with Salesforce’s CRM Sales Cloud, so you can see customer service cases in the CRM product and more.

Built with social at its core, Desk.com allows small businesses work with and respond to customers over Twitter, Facebook and more. Basically, Desk.com integrates Twitter and Facebook customer service comments with other channels like email, phone and web within the agent desktop. Agents can also see data on how many cases customer service agents have opened, resolved, replied to, reassigned, or reopened—regardless of who was assigned the case. Desk.com includes twelve pre-built reports providing data for average handle time, time to first response, first contact resolution rate, and more.

Salesforce is also touting the simple deployment of Desk.com for small businesses. With only four required fields, a company can register for its own social help desk in a matter of seconds. Desk.com also provides a checklist to help companies get started, and each task that a company works through earns the company flex hour credits that anyone in the company can use.

Clients can use the Desk.com HTML5 mobile app to respond to customers on the go from a variety of devices, including iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Users respond to support cases using the same filters from their desktop client and access the entire macro library without having to type long replies. Users can also re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases, and modify customer information associated with cases.

Pricing starts at $49 per full-time agent, per month, for unlimited usage. Salesforce says there is flexible pricing is also available for $1 per part-time agent, per hour. Desk.com already has a number of well-known web companies using its customer service platform including Yelp, Square, Spotify, Vimeo, Pandora, and One Kings Lane.

At the time of the acquisition, Salesforce’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said of Assistly: Salesforce has spent over a decade democratizing enterprise applications in the cloud…The Assistly acquisition doubles down on that strategy by putting us at the heart of the new trend of customer service help desk applications that have instant sign up and zero-touch onboarding, expanding the potential reach of the Service Cloud to millions of companies around the world.

Salesforce already offers the Service Cloud to companies, which helps businesses connect with customers across both traditional and social channels, and counts customers such as Southwest Airlines. For Salesforce, this is a way to aggressively go after the small to medium-sized business community who needs a simple and mobile SaaS for help desk support. Desk.com will face competition from another popular customer service app for small to medium-sized businesses, Zendesk.

And unsurprisingly, social and mobile are central to how Salesforce is positioning Desk.com to be the premier (yet cost-effective) customer service alternative for businesses and companies. Next up for Salesforce’s new products—leveraging the Rypple acquisition with the launch of a human talent management SaaS Successforce.

CRM and cloud giant Salesforce has announced a key hire today—former U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra. Kundra has joined the company as executive vice president of emerging markets.

Kundra joined the Obama administration in March of 2009. As the first Chief Information Officer of the United States, Kundra managed more than $80 billion in technology investments and was an early evangelist of cloud computing in the public sector. Kundra also authored the ‘Cloud-First policy,’ which aims to guide government IT organizations around the world on how to be efficient with fewer resources.

Kundra also spearheaded the Data.gov initiative, which aimed to democratize data access; and launched the Federal IT Dashboard, which gives an assessment of the cost of large government IT projects

“Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing,” said Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff “His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”

Prior to serving as U.S. CIO, Kundra was the chief technology officer for Washington D.C. and was the assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the state of Virginia. Last June, Kundra stepped down from his position as CIO to take a fellowship at Harvard University, which was a joint program with the Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Yesterday, Salesforce announced the acquisition of social performance platform Rypple, and revealed that it will be entering the human capital management (a.k.a. employee and talent management software) market with the launch of a new product Successforce. For Salesforce, the announcement of a new product vertical and the entry into a new market is a big deal. And when you consider SAP’s recent $3.4 billion acquisition of talent management software giant SuccessFactors, things start to get interesting.

We sat down with Salesforce EVP John Wookey, who will be leading Successforce and is a former SAP and Oracle alum; as well as Daniel Debow, co-CEO and co-founder of Rypple; to discuss what the acquisition means for Salesforce.

For background, Rypple is a social performance management platform that helps managers and employees improve performance. Essentially, Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with a more social and collaborative approach. The software has been compared to a “Zynga for the enterprise,” and allows managers to track projects, guide their team and give kudos to deserving staff for others to see within its online application.

Rypple also employs various game mechanics, like badges, which can be custom-built to reflect a company’s own values. And employees can rack up “skills earned,” in a method reminiscent of building up a character in a virtual world or MMORPG, for example. The company’s software is used by Facebook, Spotify, Gilt Groupe and others.

Wookey explains that the entry in the human capital management software market, which he says is a $6 billion yearly market opportunity, fits in with Salesforce’s overall goal of making the enterprise more social “There’s been a focus on the social enterprise but this also needs to work within the organization internally, and this has to has to begin with a company’s people and talent,” he explains. “It’s not just about human capital management, it’s about how to use concept of social enterprise to effectively manage people. This is the next step in enabling the social enterprise.”

As we explained above, Rypple has been pushing the envelope when it comes to bringing social actions into the talent management space. Debow tells us that the world of work has changed but the process used to manage people has not changed at all, and dismisses SuccessFactors as being part of the old guard of talent software that basically automates forms of business but not behaviors.

“Rypple amplifies behaviors that drive real performance,” Debow says. When it comes to coaching, goal setting, evaluations, and more, we are helping drive performance by actually replicating many of the social actions people take in their lives.” He uses an example of working with Spotify recently to help with goal setting. With a new ‘social goals 2.0,’ product, Rypple helped Spotify work with employees to evaluate how to use objectives and results to drive the business forward. Users could create objectives and goals for Spotify, invite people to comment, and commit to an objective, Debow explains.

“The fact is that we built the product with some of the more social organizations on the planet, including Facebook,” he says.

Wookey says that as Salesforce was evaluating its entry into human capital management, the company did look at the potential competitors and saw that there is a lot of software that people aren’t happy with, and decided that the social approach is going to grow the market. “There’s a natural synergy between social actions and how you effectively align awards, learning systems, help employee career paths and support individual talent,” he adds.

While Salesforce still needs to launch Successforce and integrate Rypple fully, the company already has plans for integrations into existing Salesforce products like Chatter, the Sales Cloud and more. Debow says that integrations will include the ability to work with Chatter, CRM and other products to track completion rates or work and record this into Successforce.

Salesforce probably didn’t drop as much cash as it did with Radian6′s $326 million acquisition, but that doesn’t mean it’s not putting massive amounts of resources into making the acquisition a new business for the CRM giant. After talking to both Wookey and Debow, it’s clear that Salesforce has major ambitions for social human capital management as a new product and revenue line (Wookey is optimistic on the revenue front).

But if Wookey’s estimates of a $6 billion human capital management market are right, this could end up being a significant new source of growth for Salesforce.

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Dan Kaplan, who leads Product Marketing for Twilio and writes occasionally about the extrapolation of the present into the future. Before Twilio, he worked as a contractor in Product Marketing for Salesforce. Follow him @dankaplan or find him on Quora.

You’ve got to hand it to Salesforce: The big battleship of Cloud CRM is remarkably adept at turning its boat around to make war against the startups aiming torpedoes at its hull.

First, it was Yammer.

Flash back to the 2008 TechCrunch50: Yammer enters the market with a bold play: Build an enterprise collaboration app around the status update and newsfeed mechanic, give most of it away for free to let individual teams test it out, and then acquire enterprise customers from the bottom up. Once you’ve got the users and the attention of their bosses, (so the logic goes), you leverage what you’ve launched into a platform that can support a wide range of apps. Some of these apps you build yourself, some you open up to third parties.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, judging the competition, saw Yammer on stage and said, “I really like this company the best”.

Fast forward one year to Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2009 conference, and Benioff is announcing Chatter, a status update and newsfeed app that integrates with Salesforce CRM but otherwise looks an awful lot like Yammer.

Fast forward again to this year’s Dreamforce conference, and Yammer is handing out free Starbucks coupons outside Moscone Conference Center and making a big deal about its new ability to integrate with Salesforce.

Whether or not Salesforce’s entry has made a meaningful dent in Yammer’s enterprise-domination ambitions is an open question, but it seems that Chatter was a depth charge intended for Yammer’s submarine.

This time, it’s Asana.

At the beginning of this month, after almost three full years in development, Asana (a startup founded in 2009 by Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, and early Facebook employee, Justin Rosenstein) launched to the public with an ambitious but now familiar play: Build a team collaboration app (this one around to-do lists and projects), give most of it away for free, acquire enterprise customers from the bottom up and leverage that foundation into a platform that can solve a wide range of businesses’ needs.

Fast forward to literally five days later and Salesforce is announcing Do — a simple collaborative to-do list for teams and projects that integrates with Salesforce’s CRM and looks an awful lot like … Asana.

Yet again, Salesforce heard a ping on its radar. Yet again, the battleship shifted course to attack the enemy submarine. But with Asana, Salesforce now finds itself up against an entirely different, more menacing foe, one whose capabilities are a more dangerous threat than those of the one it faced before.

The thin edge of the wedge.

If you’re wondering how some project management app — even one built by Facebook rockstars — could possibly represent even a minor risk to the master of cloud CRM, consider this brief history of Salesforce.

When Salesforce launched its automation app in 2000, it was essentially a content management system for sales contact records. Armed with this core, Marc Benioff’s marketing genius, and the advantages of the cloud, Salesforce pushed its way into the enterprise through the sales department’s door.

From there, the company has tried hard to take its original product and use it as a platform to launch new applications and empower third-party developers to launch even more. (This is what Chris Dixon cleverly coined the “thin edge of the wedge” strategy: You slide your way into the market’s cracks with one thing, than push on that edge until you’ve busted the whole market wide open.)

One problem Salesforce faces with executing this strategy is that the thin edge of CRM does not abstract particularly well into other problems. Sure, you can bolt things on (like tasks or a social newsfeed) but when it comes down to it, you’re dealing with a core framework that was built to handle customer record data and metadata and not much else.

Salesforce CRM, after all, is basically just a browser-based version of software that originated long before the Web became a full-fledged platform and way, way before the Web went mobile. You can push the CRM framework from its roots in sales into customer support, but if you try to push it much further, you’re going to start crashing into walls.

The other problem is that, as even diehard Salesforce fans will point out, the underpinnings of Salesforce’s user experience are a relic from the early days of the cloud. “Wouldn’t it be great”, you can’t help but say to yourself as you wait for a screen or interaction in Salesforce to load, “if something came along that cracked the core problems of CRM but whose interface didn’t slow me down?”

Enter Asana, stage left, with arguably the quickest, most adaptable project management app on the Web. Behind the surface of Asana’s collaborative to-do list is a real-time interface and a tremendously ambitious vision: To make collaboration so fluid, effortless and fast that the software eventually becomes the standard conduit between humanity and the work it needs to get done. Underpinning Asana is a highly-flexible data model constructed entirely around managing tasks.

Unlike customer records (or social sharing plus manual status updates, for that matter) tasks form the core of everything we aim (or should aim) to do at our jobs. Unlike CRM, you can abstract a properly-designed task framework across every function and every line of work. Among other things, you can go after ticket management for customer support, applicant tracking for HR, bug tracking for IT and, of course, CRM for sales (indeed, there are already companies using Asana for some of these things).

If you want to find a thin edge that can expand into the entire enterprise, collaborative task management is a great place to start. The founders of Asana know this, which is why they are doing what they are doing.

Which brings us back to Salesforce’s Do. Do is the first Salesforce app built on Heroku, coded in Rails and written in HTML5. Thanks in part to the platforms it’s built on, Do works well on mobile devices and is generally much faster and more responsive than the mainstay Salesforce apps built on Force.com. But despite these advances, Do’s design is less carefully considered than that of Asana; its interactions less meticulously crafted; its interface not realtime.

When you play with both apps, it becomes clear that Asana’s team has devoted more time thinking through the problems surrounding collaboration and building the intellectual and technological horsepower necessary to tackle these problems head-on.

In co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, respectively, Asana’s got Facebook’s original architect and the guy who has us pressing “Like” buttons all over the web. In Kenny Van Zant, Asana has the man who built Solar Winds’ bottom-up marketing strategy and knows how to penetrate the enterprise with freemium models like the back of his hand.

Despite Salesforce’s agility and the best sales and marketing machine in tech, it’s going to be hard for Do to win. The app is up against a killer team with an expansive vision, a solid product foundation, and a deep understanding of the problems at hand. If Salesforce wants to protect its core business from Asana’s eventual, inevitable assault, the CRM juggernaut will have to empower Do’s team to do remarkable things, up to and including the cannibalization of Salesforce CRM. So the question becomes: Will the Salesforce battleship, facing down an upstart nemesis, have what it takes to defend against the Asana submarine?

The question is a big one, so break out your popcorn: The war for the future of enterprise software is officially on.

Salesforce.com has announced the acquisition of cloud computing services startup Model Metrics. Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2011, have not been disclosed.

Model Metrics consulting firm that helps enterprise organizations accelerate the adoption of cloud computing. Specifically, Model Metrics focuses on helping companies adopt mobile and call center technologies, social enterprise solutions, business processes and more. In fact, Model Metrics has completed 1,000+ Salesforce deployments for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies. The company also helps businesses create custom mobile solutions for iPad and Android.

Founded in 2003 and based in Chicago, Model Metrics, which has raised $6.5 million in funding, has partnered with Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, Apple, and Google. Clients include Abbott, Boeing, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, L’Oreal, Morgan Stanley, and NBC Universal.

Salesforce says that the addition of Model Metrics will “empower partners to develop their social enterprise practice.” The CRM giant’s strategic services team will have more mobile and social capabilities with Model Metrics.

Recent Salesforce acquisitions include Assistly, and Radian6.

In September, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff hinted at a new work management product, Do.com. Today, the CRM giant is finally releasing more details about Do, which is a simple task management mobile and web app for both businesses and consumers. While the app is still in private beta, we have invites for 200 TechCrunch reaers. Using the invite code ‘XIBUSPAHYN’ you can sign up for the app here.

Do is born from Salesforce’s acquisition of social productivity and task management app Manymoon earlier this year. Manymoon is a favorite on the Google Apps Marketplace and is one the platform’s most downloaded Apps Extensions.

Do tasks and project management app allows small teams and individuals to manage task lists, organize projects, and capture notes. The app allows you to assign tasks to other users (non-Do users can be sent an email to join), and in joint tasks, users can comment on tasks, accept and reject assignments and more.

Do also serves as an Evernote-like application and allows you to take notes from within the app, and assign yourself tasks from parts of your notes.

As Salesforce says, the app is meant to be used for both everyday consumer, list management use as well as for small group use within a business. So you can use the app to plan a dinner party or coordinate a marketing launch. Once you have a number of different tasks with shared users, you’ll see a Chatter-like Activity Feed, with real-time alerts and access to any comments on specific tasks.

The app is available via a web-based HTML5 app, as well as an iOS app. Do will also be available in the Google Apps Marketplace, Salesforce App Exchange, Chrome Web Store and LinkedIn App Marketplace. Any actions in one of these apps will be synced across your Do account. And Do is integrates with Dropbox so you can share files within the application from the file sharing service.

Do is free for now but Salesforce says eventually it will be adding paid features such as administrative controls and customization. For now, Do is still in private beta but will be opening up to larger audience over next few weeks, and will eventually open to the public in late November.

Of course, there are some similarities between Salesforce’s enterprise social network Chatter and Do, which also has a social communications function. But Salesforce’s senior VP Sean Whiteley, says that Do is meant for very small groups and teams, whereas Chatter is ideal for large enterprises and businesses. Whiteley also says that it will eventually integrate Do with Chatter in the future.

Enterprise CRM giant Salesforce.com is getting a COO today. The company is announcing that it is promoting George Hu to Chief Operating Officer. Hu previously held the title of Executive Vice President, Platform, Marketing, and Operations and will continue to report to Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff in his new role.

Hu joined Salesforce.com in 2002 and served as vice president of product marketing, senior vice president of applications, executive vice president of products, and chief marketing officer prior to joining the executive team in his most recent role. Hu also led Salesforce.com’s corporate development and investment strategy since 2009, including the acquisitions of Jigsaw, Heroku, and Radian6.

Previously, Hu held product management and strategic consulting roles at North Point Communications and Boston Consulting Group.

Salesforce actually didn’t have a COO previously, so Hu isn’t filling anyone else’s shoes. Founder Marc Benioff serves as Chairman & CEO and co-founder Parker Harris is the company’s Executive Vice President of Technology.

“George’s leadership over the past nine years has been key to driving salesforce.com’s growth to over a $2B run rate,” said Benioff in a statement. “I look forward to seeing his vision and leadership as COO scale our growth toward $10B and beyond.”

As COO, Hu will lead all major shared operational functions for the company including information technology, employee success, facilities, security, as well Salesforce.com’s platform division, global marketing, strategic alliances, and corporate development.

Editor’s note: This post was written by guest contributor Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net. His last post on TechCrunch was Go Forth and Conquer.

The narrative of the little guy going up against the hulking giant is baked into the history of Silicon Valley, starting with the traitorous eight leaving Shockley Semiconductor to subsequently found Intel, AMD, Kleiner Perkins, and many other industry disruptors of their time.  Fighting unnaturally large battles is part of the technology industry’s DNA, and yet it would seem that every startup begins the process anew, rewriting the story of how to compete and succeed in the face of formidably large competitors.

There are times when competing against the incumbent feels like an insurmountable challenge (and by “times,” I mean pretty much every day).  Your larger, more established and better-resourced competitor is an ominous and omnipresent danger to your existence.  It will subsidize its products to compete with you, monopolize the distribution channel, spend more on marketing a single launch than you will ever raise, and create uncertainty in the market about your product among customers.  Given all this, startups should be in an inherently disadvantaged position in any market, emerging or mature.  And in most industries outside of technology – those that rely on high fixed costs, retail distribution, or a vast network of partners – this is absolutely the case.  But in the world of internet-delivered services, rapid innovation, evolution, and constant disruption, no one’s power is guaranteed.  This creates huge opportunities for startups going up against the big guys, if executed properly.

Finding the new dimension that matters 

Larger competitors are rife with gaps in their product offerings, but these should never be the main impetus for starting a company.  Blind spots or holes are often easy to spot, but rarely the best areas to compete on (unless you’re aiming for acquisition).  Merely filling the gap of an existing player lacks the upside of an outsized return, and puts you at the mercy of the competitor “completing” its product and thus neutralizing your differentiation.  Rather, success is best achieved by taking advantage of completely new vectors that the larger incumbent isn’t valuing appropriately, or can’t build on altogether.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” – Sun Tzu

Take the case of Box’s competition with SharePoint.  When SharePoint launched, it started simply enough as a corporate portal tool that let you share documents and work on projects.  After early success and rapid adoption, Microsoft evolved the product to cover broader content management and collaboration.  SharePoint was the “light-weight” commodity solution in the space, competing with stalwarts like Documentum and even Oracle.  Fast forward to 2011, and SharePoint has consistently expanded to tackle more and more enterprise use cases, with a staggering 125 million SharePoint licenses sold and 93,000 partners. If SharePoint were a stand-alone company, it would be one of the top 50 software firms in the world.

Yet this ubiquity and success has brought new challenges:  SharePoint is nearly impossible to manage, prone to sprawl, and overkill for most organizations. Furthermore, the way people work has changed dramatically in the decade since SharePoint came into existence.  While many of the extensive features that SharePoint offers are still critically important to some businesses, the core value of the service – document sharing and collaboration – has had its usability and innovation eroded by the clutter of countless other services.  This has left a huge opening in the market for competitors to pivot off the specific dimensions that matter most today: getting access to content from mobile devices, working from anywhere, sharing outside the firewall, and more.

While this process of vigorously adding features (until the original point of differentiation is forgotten) is quite pervasive in the enterprise, leaders in the consumer space often share the same fate.  While not every company succumbs to complexity, they do all generate sufficiently large weaknesses and gaps. Those that are focused on just a handful of problems (Apple and the ‘new Google’) present huge opportunities for startups in the areas they’re not attending to; other unfocused giants (Microsoft or IBM) often don’t serve their customers fully.   And for every customer that feels they’re paying too much, dealing with too much complexity, or not solving fundamental problems with an existing solution, there lies an opportunity to compete on a new dimension in the market.

Giving startups the advantage yet again, large competitors are notoriously lazy when it comes to quickly finding emerging budgets at enterprise customers; this is why you’ll see categories like social CRM (Radian6), marketing automation (Eloqua, Marketo), or mobile security (MobileIron, Lookout) nearly always led by startups.  And with business models on the internet constantly in flux, startups are able to penetrate markets more efficiently than ever before.  MySQL made the database free, and charged for support.  Skype collapsed the cost of calling by making it peer-to-peer.  Zynga made playing games social instead of solitary, charging users incrementally versus up front.  Salesforce helped customers get started with CRM in minutes, and charged elastically.

These were all angles that the incumbents couldn’t recognize or exploit, at the time, without dramatically shifting their businesses in response.  If and when they do decide to get on board, it’s often too late for them to make a dent.

Why big companies struggle to compete

Investors, partners, potential employees and onlookers will nearly always default to believing the incumbent will win.  Every leading company today was once an underdog without a chance:  Apple and IBM. VMWare and Microsoft.  Facebook and, uh, Myspace.  Salesforce and Siebel, or Microsoft again.  We instinctively expect big companies can take over the market, but it’s their size which renders them nearly defenseless against new, more agile competitors.  The Innovator’s Dilemma describes the difficulty a larger corporation faces in competing with products or new solutions that serve to undercut their lucrative business model.  While we tend to point our attention to the economic rationale around why this happens—most companies don’t want to disrupt a highly profitable business that’s working just fine—the organizational paralysis that prevents effective competition is far more interesting.

Simply put, the size of a company and its speed are inversely related.  As a large system, organizations generally lack the ability to act and respond quickly to changes in a market, new challenges from customers, and disruptive new technologies.  The very processes and procedures that keep a large business successful invariably slow down the key decisions and actions needed to compete in new areas; the travel time between customer feedback from a sales rep to decisions being made by a product organization, or actually getting built, can be measured in quarters, if not years.  Andy Grove’s Intel famously made the rapid transition from memory to microprocessors, but far too few large organizations respond quickly enough, and with the right conviction to these types of difficult challenges.

Did Microsoft’s product managers not see the impact and importance of Android or the iPhone?  Did Siebel not see CRM delivered over the web as a threat?  When large organizations are attacked, it takes a disproportionate amount of energy to modify course, or affect meaningful change in the marketplace.

By comparison, in a startup, the distance from data to decision may be hours.  Startups have the benefit of expending 100% of their energy on competing externally, ideally without the need to fight internally for resources, preparing obsequious strategy presentations, or disrupting existing lucrative businesses to address the market effectively.  But to take advantage of this, you need to be incessantly focused on changes in the market, emerging technologies that drive cost performance, or new disruptions that can be leveraged that set you apart.  And your startup must maintain the speed and agility of decision-making, but also execution, to respond in a way dissimilar to your larger competitors—whether it’s iPads emerging in the enterprise, Facebook becoming a “host” for social games, or cell phones being able to double as payment gateways.

Focus, Focus, Focus

Startups only have an opportunity at winning, though, if they focus on the new areas in which the incumbent players can’t compete,  You only have an advantage over a big competitor if you focus disproportionately on your area of expertise and new dimension, avoiding all the common distractions that take you off course.  In Geoffrey Moore’s new book, Escape Velocity, he calls this practice placing asymmetric bets.  And your asymmetric bets need to be the opposite, or at least materially different, from your competitors (naturally).  These are the attacks you’re going to bet the entire business on, and by doing so you earn a chance to win the market.  Zendesk is doing it with socially-integrated customer support, Domo and GoodData with dramatically simpler business intelligence, SnapLogic with cloud integrations, and Zuora with subscription processing.  In each of these areas, there’s reason to believe incumbents can’t or won’t get to the market fast enough before the products are scaled, and the payoff only comes when it’s taken to the max.

Startups often don’t exploit their advantage aggressively or acutely enough.  It’s easy to get caught up in the different directions and opportunities that being in a new category creates.  You have to constantly shy away from new product directions and extensions that may immediately net new customers or opportunities, but will ultimately take away from your critical focus.  To succeed as a startup, you have to capitalize on the strengths that accompany your size and market position.

Going up against the big guys is insanely tough.  But you don’t have to approach it blindly—the Valley is filled with broadly applicable battle tales and success stories.  And there’s plenty of reasons to try.

Photo credit: Robert Scoble.

Checkmarx, an Israeli provider of static application security testing solutions, this morning announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of financing in a round led by earlier backer Ofer Hi-Tech, with participation from cloud computing company Salesforce.com.

The additional capital will be used to promote Checkmarx’s cloud-based source code scanning service CxCloud and ramp up sales and marketing efforts.

Checkmarx’ solutions basically enable software developers to track, throughout the applications’ lifecycle, whether their code is following internal or external compliance requirements or is in accordance with the developing and hosting platform guidelines.

Today, Checkmarx supports programming languages and frameworks such as C#, Java, C/C++, VB6 and PHP, as well as platform languages and frameworks such as Salesforce.com’s Apex and VisualForce.

The fun continued this morning at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco. Or, I should say, the fun continued at a restaurant across the street. Fine dining and location aside, for those unfamiliar, yesterday afternoon Oracle CEO Larry Ellison cancelled a keynote that was planned for this morning by none other than his former employee and frenemy: CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff.

As we reported yesterday, Benioff tweeted last night to his followers, “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!”

Though Oracle representatives were quick to say that the cancellation was simply a result of “overwhelming attendance”, and that Benioff was offered a keynote later in the week, it’s hard to say that this isn’t the result of something more than a full schedule. Puh-leeze. Then again, whether or not it betrays the simmering feud between Ellison and Benioff (and who has the keys to the “real” cloud), it was also just a genius promotional move by the Salesforce CEO. Let’s call a spade a spade.

In an address to reporters this morning at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco (ahem, not the Moscone Center, the scene of OpenWorld), the Salesforce CEO said that he had petitioned Oracle last night, specifically Judy Sim Oracle’s CMO, who Benioff says he’s known for years, hoping to win his spot back on stage. Sim was apparently not in favor, and as Benioff is scheduled to fly to Ohio on Thursday, Oracle was obviously unwilling to double back and offer Benioff the opportunity to give his keynote today.

In reference to the seemingly passive-aggressive move by Oracle, Benioff said, “normally, no one would have cared what I had to say today”, but because of the traction the cancellation was able to garner last night on blogs, Facebook, Twitter et al, many more people are paying attention to this than might have otherwise. And I daresay the Salesforce CEO was enjoying it.

Benioff said that Larry Ellison had once taught him to read and internalize “The Art Of War” by Sun Tzu, in which the high ranking Chinese military general and strategist advised readers to “ignore the anger” and use it for good. All Ellison had to do in response was say to his staff “let me know what he says, and thanks for bringing it to my attention”, he said. What’s more, according the Salesforce CEO, Oracle knew exactly what he planned to say in his keynote, as they gave Oracle the slides he would share during his keynote beforehand, which he said were very similar in nature to the talk he gave at Salesforce’s Dreamforce Conference back in August.

Not to mention, as the New York Times reported last night, a keynote speech at a top conference like OpenWorld can cost the speaker up to $1 million. According to Benioff, Oracle offered him his money back. So, clearly, they weren’t particularly eager to reverse their position.

Outside of their business strategies, the Salesforce and Oracle CEOs both are quick to acknowledge their mutual respect and admiration, but when it comes to the future of technology, the future of the cloud, and the different approaches that each company takes to their business strategy and revenue models, there’s little to no love lost.

Last year at the OpenWorld Conference, Benioff seized the opportunity to take a few digs at Oracle’s philosophy and its software, most notably calling Oracle’s Exadata system “the false cloud” that is far from aligned from what enterprise customers want and need in today’s cloud computing world. And, of course, Ellison was not one to retreat from the jab, using his keynote to express problems with, in particular, the security of Salesforce’s architecture, saying, “You’ve got many customers and their data just coexist in the same database, and since there’s no fault-isolation, a system failure brings down many customers”. Ellison then showed the audience a slide of Benioff’s most recent book “Behind The Cloud”, that had been altered to say, “Way Behind The Cloud”.

Oh snap! Some might say that this is just “all in good fun”, or pointless drama. But today shows that there is indeed a more-than-superficial divide between these two companies, and even though Microsoft and Oracle are the dominant players in the space, as Oracle, for one, has approximately $36 billion in revenue and a market cap of $144 billion (compared to Salesforce’s $2 billion in revenues and market capitalization of $16 billion), the hardware company is certainly all too aware of how quickly the eager young upstart is gaining.

And if Salesforce is gaining, might it have something to do with Benioff’s conception of the future of the cloud? In the past — and again today — Benioff has been outspoken in his belief that IT companies must become social enterprises — that the social revolution is very real and needs to be a significant part of the IT industry’s future.

Of course, Ellison is quick to point out that Salesforce isn’t a real cloud company, because it is applications-only, rather than apps backed by that all-important cloud infrastructure. And Oracle, Ellison believes, is more typical of a cloud computing company with its end-to-end stack is far from a partial cloud, nor does it lack the virtualization traditionally pictured when one thinks of the cloud — and something that he believes Salesforce does not offer to the same extent.

On the other side, Benioff said that his company’s strategic acquisitions of Heroku, the Ruby-based cloud app deployment and scaling platform, Radian6, and Jigsaw over the last 18 months, while expensive, were important moves forward in allowing the company to realize its social future. “We can’t believe everything ourselves”, he said. In particular, Benioff was so excited about the Heroku acquisition that he led it himself — largely because of the appeal of Heroku’s multi-language and multi-tenant platform, which is what enterprise cloud customers really want, the CEO said.

Because of Salesforce’s tight integration with Facebook, with the Heroku acquisition, Salesforce has allowed developers to go straight to Facebook to build applications right on the social network that automatically integrate social features and make the Salesforce experience more in tune with the current needs of businesses.

While showcasing Chatter (Salesforce’s Facebook for the corporate customer) today, Benioff admitted that his company’s adoption of non-proprietary software and social media is “contrarian”, and many in the industry (including Ellison) disagree with this direction. Yet, he is firmly of the belief that “social technology is shaking our industry at the core” — and don’t expect the company to be pivoting on its social mantra anytime soon.

“The message of this show is proprietary hardware and software are the future”, the Salesforce CEO said, “our message is beware of the false cloud. It is not efficient, it is not democratic, it is not open”. And who does Benioff see as the main proponent of the false cloud? Take a wild guess.

It has also become clear that Benioff’s tweets from last night irked Ellison — as well as others at Oracle, as MarketWatch reported that NetSuite Chief Executive Zach Nelson criticized Benioff’s words in an email saying, “Last time I looked, Salesforce.com is built on the Oracle database, so I think Marc slamming Oracle for not being a cloud provider is a bit bizarre”. Benioff responded by saying that Oracle’s technology is one part of Salesforce’s infrastructure that also relies on technologies like Dell to make Salesforce hum.

Concluding his question and answer session with reporters today, Benioff was of the view that, today, Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference has become a “bigger venue and a more exciting conference” as a whole. While Salesforce may not have proprietary mainframes, he said in a dig at Oracle, Dreamforce is now big enough that the company no longer needs Oracle’s conference to get their message out.

Thus, in reference to his company’s future (or at least his own future) at Oracle’s conference, he concluded: “This is probably our swan song”. And just like that, the standoff takes another step forward.

But wait, did Benioff just beat Ellison at his own game?

(More on the cancellation from last night here.)

Thanks to Reuters for the Excerpt image

Well, well, well. The Oracle OpenWorld Conference is in full swing, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers tomorrow (Wednesday). “Was” being the operative word here. Thanks to a recent update from Benioff’s Twitter account, it seems that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has cancelled Mr. Benioff’s keynote tomorrow.

Hmmm. Instead, Larry will be king of the stage, with a one hour and forty-five minute keynote, kicking off at 2:45 p.m. PST. No word as of yet on why Ellison cancelled the Salesforce CEO’s keynote. Not even Benioff was sure: “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!”

Sorry #oow11 I don't know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I'm disappointed too!—
Marc Benioff (@Benioff) October 05, 2011

As you might have garnered from his tweet, Benioff will likely instead be answering questions and interacting with the media at the Ame Restaurant in the St. Regis Hotel on Wednesday at 10:30 a.m PST. We’ll be there to cover, and will be sure to share any helpful words of advice Benioff has for the man who just gave him the early hook, as they say in showbiz.

Now, we’re not in the business of speculating here, but (at least according to Forbes) Benioff upstaged Ellison last year at OpenWorld, poking holes in Oracle’s strategy, in relation to cloud computing specifically, and so there’s very definitely the possibility that Ellison doesn’t want that kind of mockery on stage before he presents a potentially expansive talk on the state of the cloud. Then again, why invite the Salesforce CEO to the conference if you’re just going to un-invite him?

Especially considering that (as reported by the New York Times) a keynote speech at a top conference like OpenWorld can cost the speaker up to 1 million big ones. Earlier this week, Benioff published a series of blog posts deriding Ellison’s opening remarks at OpenWorld (and has, in the past, been incited by Ellison who posted slides of Benioff’s book “Behind The Cloud, altering it to “Way Behind The Cloud”), told the NYT that he got an email from Oracle this afternoon about the cancellation — and also offering Benioff his million dollars back. Wouldn’t be surprised if the email included “and don’t let the door hit you on the way out”.

The cloud, it seems, is setting the stage for a rumble — as there are clearly at least two prominent executives out there who can’t agree on its future, and who has the keys to that future. (Or who has the keys to the “false cloud”.)

Whether strategic gamesmanship, or a “just because I can” move from Ellison, or perhaps just a scheduling mixup (yea, right), we’ll be tuning in tomorrow to see what unfolds. It should be interesting.

We’ve reached out to Oracle for comment, and will update when we learn more.

Update: Oracle Senior Director of Communications Deborah Hellinger told me that the cancellation of Benioff’s keynote was “due to the overwhelming attendance at Oracle OpenWorld”, which led to Oracle making several session changes. According to the Communications Director, the “Salesforce.com Executive Solution Session” will now take place on Thursday at 8:00 a.m. Benioff apparently has a prior commitment, so will be holding the Q&A session on Wednesday morning instead.

Excerpt image retrieved from SearchCloudComputing

Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised a whopping $50 million in new funding with participation from CRM giant Salesforce.com. Past investors also participated in the round, as well as new ‘strategic partners’, who will be revealed soon. Box’s past investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners. This brings Box’s total funding to $128 million.

Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

The company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith out of their dorm rooms in 2005 with the goal of making it easy for people to access and share all their content, from anywhere. Today, the company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500. This year, Box landed its biggest enterprise deal yet (and one of the largest cloud SaaS deals ever) with 18,000 seats with P&G.

The company says that 200,000+ new users join each month and the average enterprise deployment size doubles every two quarters. Over 1,000 new companies sign up for the business and enterprise editions monthly and Box has seen a 600% growth in mobile deployments in 2011 compared to all of 2010.

CEO Levie tells us in the video below that the future of enterprise software will be personal, social and smart, which means that content will actually connect users and help productivity in the enterprise. help connect users to content, make better decisions, faster, and work more effectively with anyone.

Box raised $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year but Levie says that because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, an expansion round made sense. And the company has even become a pricey acquisition target.

Salesforce, in particular, as a partner makes sense says Levie considering both of the company’s bets in the cloud. Box will be debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and will continue to roll out deeper integrations in the future. And Levie says that most of Box’s customers user Salesforce as well.

Levie explains that the company didn’t need to raise more money, with the potential acceleration of growth in the cloud, the company wanted to be prepared to mitigate this growth. The new funding will be used to add additional infrastructure, for research and product development and for hiring. There are no current acquisitions on the horizon, but Levie says that the company would certainly be interested in acquiring if there is the right fit.

Check out our video with Levie chatting about the new round below.

At the company’s first customer conference today, cloud storage platform Box.net is revealing a number of new features and products. The company is debuting a cross-platform enterprise sync solution for both Mac and PC devices, additional security features as well as new social capabilities.
 
For background, Box, which has 7 million users and stores 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a file storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, access the platform via the mobile web, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

Box.net had previously offered a Sync desktop client, which allowed users to sync Box.net folders with their PC desktops. But Box has totally rebuilt the sync engine and is debuting a new version of Box Sync for Windows and the first-ever Box Sync for Mac. This allows users to access Box files from their desktop, work offline in native applications, sync edits back to Box, and access synced content from any mobile device. Customers including Turner Construction, TaylorMade, Pandora and LinkedIn are early users of Box Sync.


Box Sync for Windows and Box Sync for Mac will available as free downloadable desktop clients for Business and Enterprise customers in October. Additionally, Box and HP has announced that they’re working together to distribute Box Sync on future PCs to HP’s business customers later in 2011.

Box also unveiled a number of security features that will roll out to Business and Enterprise customers in Q4. A new Trusted Access section tracks which browsers, applications and devices are connected to Box. And sharing controls will make it easy for organizations to define sharing permissions by domain and user group. Additionally, Box announced a strategic collaboration with cloud identity provider Okta to help customers better manage identities in the cloud, adding to existing integrations with VMware and Ping Identity.

In terms of social, Box has already added a number collaborative features to its cloud-based platform but today is announcing that it will be brining new social capabilities to users over the next few quarters. These include making Box updates more personalized and intelligent, helping surface and discover more relevant content, and social commenting.

But Levie tells me that Box isn’t gunning to win social space, and wants to actually work and cope with existing social enterprise platforms like Yammer, Jive and Salesforce Chatter. In fact, Box is also announcing an in-depth integration with Salesforce Chatter using Chatter Connect. This will allow Chatter and Box users to collaborate in Chatter with content stored on Box. Salesforce also announced its participation as an investor in Box’s newly announced $50 million funding round.

It’s no secret that Box has seen tremendous growth in 2011 thanks to a growing acceptance of the cloud by businesses and large companies. Box says it is seeing consistent 3x year-over-year revenue growth, and has been adopted by 100,000 businesses, including 77% of the Fortune 500. And the company is even a pricey acquisition target. To help expand even further, Box just raised another $50 million in growth capital. And Levie says we can expect more product announcements from Box in the future.

Salesforce has just bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly. The purchase price is $50 million, and the deal is all-cash.

Assistly helps companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more.

Update: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is reporting that the acquisition price is $50 million, plus an additional $30 million in deferred payments over two years for a total of $80 million.

Assistly and Salesforce already had a previous relationship. Salesforce made a strategic investment in Assistly. And the startup recently launched an app on the AppExchange that allows sales and support teams see data, like customer contact info and status while working on cases direct from Salesforce.

Assistly, which only launched to the public last September, offers companies an option of paying for total usage instead of seats, so people can jump in occasionally and only be billed for time spent on the platform. This is especially ideas for small to medium sized businesses. The company is backed by Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Kenny Van Zant, True Ventures and Social Leverage and is used Instagram, Klout, One Kings Lane, Spotify and Square.

The startup was founded by Alex Bard, Gary Benitt, Jeremy Suriel, and Brad Birnbaum, each of whom previously worked together in building customer service-based companies back in the 90′s. The first, called eShare, was acquired in 1999; the second, called eAssist Global Solutions, was eventually acquired in 2004 after stumbling through the dot com bubble burst. Following the eAssist acquisition three of the team members left the space to start Goowy, a Flash widget maker. The team reunited to develop Assistly in the customer service space.

Salesforce’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said of the acquisition: Salesforce has spent over a decade democratizing enterprise applications in the cloud…The Assistly acquisition doubles down on that strategy by putting us at the heart of the new trend of customer service help desk applications that have instant sign up and zero-touch onboarding, expanding the potential reach of the Service Cloud to millions of companies around the world.

Salesforce already offers the Service Cloud to companies, which helps businesses connect with customers across both traditional and social channels. But Assistly extends this offering to the small business community, and helps Salesforce reach this audience.

Salesforce recently bought social media monitoring company Radian6 for over $300 million.

“We’ve seen Mubarak fall,” said Salesforce’s Marc Benioff of the corporate need to focus on social networks at the recent Dreamforce conference. “We’ve seen Khadafy fall. When will the first CEO fall for the same reason?” What a fantastic comparison! Because, as we all know, dictators who brutalize, torture, and murder thousands of their own people over a period of decades are just like CEOs who miss quarterly profit targets.

Benioff isn’t a bad guy, it was just a dumb thing to say — but it’s stuck in my mind, because Salesforce, cloud-computing’s poster child, is the future, and his seems to be the voice of the zeitgeist. This feels a little like the end of an era. While I have issues with Apple’s hegemonic approach, during his career Steve Jobs repeatedly changed our sense of what was possible, and the world, by making genuinely revolutionary products. Now he’s gone. Meanwhile, Google has spent the summer laying waste to vast swathes of its product line. Google Labs, its experimental playground? Dead. Slide, bought last year for $182 million? Dead. Aardvark, bought last year for $50 million? Dead. A whole grab bag of other products and services? Dead.

And it seems that whatever survives the ongoing Mountain View bloodbath will be thoroughly monetized. Massive price hikes are on the horizon for Google’s (terrific) App Engine platform. Russell Beattie of PlusFeed reports that he’s shutting down his service because otherwise his server costs would increase by a factor of thirty. I use App Engine for my own open-source-travel-guide pet project, and my costs will apparently increase fiftyfold. (OK, that’s from a penny a day, but still.) The new pricing model is a lot like that of Salesforce’s Heroku platform. Hmmm.

Is this the right thing for Google to do? From a business perspective, hell yes. They need more focus, fewer projects, and less bureaucracy. But at the same time, they’re shutting down and/or discouraging independent and experimental projects to focus on me-too projects like Google Plus and Google Offers. Isn’t Google supposed to be a company that innovates and changes the world with its superior algorithms and scalability, rather than one that plays catch-up for the sake of profits?

Nope. That was then, this is now. With Jobs’s departure and Page’s new focus, it seems that Apple and Google are no longer primarily in the business of changing people’s lives; instead, they’re in the business of business. Marc Benioff, the voice of the zeitgeist, doesn’t actually seem to see any difference between the two.

I suspect this is pretty common among CEOs and MBAs — but most techies don’t agree at all. To us, successful businesses are a necessary means for the promulgation of revolutionary technology, not an end in and of themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge champion of free-market capitalism, and all great businesses do change the world; but there’s a big difference between doing so by intent and letting it happen as a side effect.

A famous essay from the first dot-com bust refers to what it was like for a co-founder to watch venture capitalists and MBAs take over the management of his tech company: “Like watching a group of nursery school children who’ve stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off.” I think I speak for many techies when I say we found that soothing, as well as funny. It reassured us that tech was different, that the suits would never be able to take over what we did and why we did it. But I’m sorry to say, it seems to me now that we underestimated them.

Image credit: Paul G, Flickr.

Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff sat down for an hour-long interview with Google’s Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt last night at Dreamforce, and here’s the full video of the interview. We’ve embedded it into the post as well.

As we covered last night, Schmidt and Benioff went down memory lane through his days at Novell and Sun Microsystems, and chatted about Google Apps, which he says has 40 million users with 5,000 firms are joining per day, as well as the success of the Android platform.

Schmidt also said that Apple’s Steve Jobs gave the best performance by a CEO in 50 years, maybe 100 years. He not only built Apple once, but twice. And he weighed in on Google’s Motorola acquisition as well as the troubled U.S. patent market.

The interview is actually very insightful, especially regarding Schmidt’s views on Apple and Steve Jobs and his suggestions on how to reform patents. It’s worth a watch if you find an hour of spare time over the holiday weekend.

Google’s Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage at CRM giant Salesforce’s annual conference Dreamforce this evening. Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff is interviewing Schmidt. Google’s chairman started out with complimenting Salesforce how they’ve managed to become a company that defines modern enterprise computing, and that the company has the ‘best vision for how enterprises will organize themselves.”

Schmidt explained that enterprise customers can now be empowered with simpler solutions and don’t have to access a complicated system, but thing are turnkey. “We went through a phase that is basic connectivity, then we have a connection and publishing phase (early parts of the web), and now we have a connecting phase,” explains Schmidt.

Schmidt reminisced about his days at Sun Microsystems and then at Novell, where he was the CEO. Of course, after Novell, Schmidt became the CEO of Google. “I went to Google not understanding very much about Google but I liked the people,” he said. “Life is short, work with people you like.”

The superstars are these creative computer scientists that can get people together and work to build products. He said that businesses are much better off working faster, “just run faster.” And he says there are collaborative tools to help that.

Benioff said that Google has cleaned Microsoft’s clock and asked Schmidt how he feels about that. “It’s hard for incumbents to move to new, faster model,” he explains. In Microsoft’s case, the company couldn’t innovate fast enough. “And we had the best data centers at the time, so we were able to get the best talent,” Schmidt explains.

He also plugged Google’s productivity suite, Google Apps, which he says has 40 million users, and 5,000 firms are joining per day.

Android has 550,000 phones activated per day, a number that doubled in four months, says Schmidt. There’s a hunger for a multi platform, multi-vendor highly competitive mobile platform, he says. And that’s Android.

Assistly, the cloud-based customer support platform that’s backed by Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Salesforce, as well as several other angels and VCs, launched version 2.0 of its platform back in July, along with rolling out a new pricing model that includes a full-featured version of its service for free.

Today, the summer features keep on rolling out for Assistly, which today announced that it would be adding two-way integration with Salesforce. Assistly for Salesforce is an AppExchange app that, according to the Assistly blog, will enable sales and support teams to “share a complete view of the customer” — in other words, customer support teams can now see data, like customer contact info and status while working on cases — direct from Salesforce. The app will also integrate with Salesforce Chatter to make it easy to involve one’s entire company in customer support, and allow users to send status updates and set rules to automatically generate Chatter messages as customer support cases age.

With Assistly for Salesforce, users can view contact history and more without having to leave Assistly, and likewise, customer support teams can view information from Salesforce — all in an effort to offer a more consistent experience to the customer. Organizations can then use Assistly to show where a customer is in the sales cycle, the status or value of that customer to the company, and the customer’s contact information. In realtime.

Assistly has had an ongoing partnership with Salesforce, and this announcement is a logical extention of the strategic investment Salesforce has made in Assistly — and shows yet another partnership forged by Salesforce to continue adding products and services that complement its existing service.

Since launching in September of last year and taking on new capital, Assistly has brought on companies like Yelp, Etsy, 37signals, Pandora, Vimeo, and Spotify as paying customers. The startup also counts Mark Cuban and David Liu as advisors.

For more, check out the video below:

Today, at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, founder and CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to adress the event’s 40,000 attendees. We know Salesforce is bullish on the social enterprise and Benioff kicked his keynote off with this statement about Salesforce: “We’re were born cloud, and now we’ve been reborn Social.”

Benioff also said that Salesforce has passed a $2 billion annual run rate in revenue. The company is now powering more than 36 billion transactions a day for over 100,000 customers. And Benioff called out Apple’s Steve Jobs, who he said led the mobile era.

“It’s an amazing time in our industry,” Benioff says. “It’s a social revolution and it’s not just about consumers. It’s about enterprise.” Adding social to a company’s communications is more than just creating a Facebook for the enterprise, he explains. And Benioff warns against the false cloud, a dig at competitor Oracle’s CRM offering.

He wants to evangelize companies into the ‘Social Enterprise.’ First, the company has to develop a social customer profile, which creates a social picture for a company. The profile captures a company’s likes on Facebook, Twitter communications, connections on LinkedIn and more.

Second, a company needs to develop and employee social network, where a company’s employees can exchange internal, realtime communications and collaborate on work. And third, Salesforce believes that companies need to develop a Customer Social Network and a Product Social Network.

Benioff also announced that Database.com is now open to all developers. Salesforce also went into a demo of the newest version of Chatter, which we covered extensively here. And the company debuted a demo of it’s new HTML5 app.

Musician Neil Young then took the stage, explaining how he is using Chatter on the set of his new movie.

Social isn’t just for Chatter, says Benioff. Salesforce is adding social to the Service Cloud and other applications, including Service Cloud With Chatter Service. In all, Salesforce will be announcing 350 new features to the company’s applications.

Social application developer Seesmic is making a big move into the social enterprise and is debuting a dedicated Android app and iPad app for Salesforce’s CRM product (Windows Phone 7 will also be added soon), called Seesmic CRM. The Android app will be launched tomorrow morning at Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce, and Seesmic will launch the iPad app in a few weeks.

For background, Seesmic, which was founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, helps you monitor and track the social web. Seesmic’s desktop, web, and mobile clients integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The bonus of using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of social web services, like YouTube, Foursquare, Techmeme, LinkedIn and others.

But of late, Seesmic has been dabbling in the enterprise and launching more business-focused features. Last Fall, Seesmic launched a deep integration with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise, Chatter. And then earlier this year, Salesforce led a $4 million round in Seesmic.

Basically the Seesmic CRM Android and iPad apps bring all the functionality of Salesforce’s CRM to mobile phones. Users can search their Salesforce.com account from the native apps; look up leads, contacts, accounts, related activities and chatter newsfeeds on the go; create and update leads, contacts, tasks, and events; log calls and emails after meetings; and much more. And the apps leverage the mobile OS; allowing users to see maps of their leads respective to their current location; upload photos and more. While pricing hasn’t been announced yet, Seesmic may charge $10 per month per user for the apps.

Le Meur tells us that he isn’t competing with Salesforce because the CRM giant currently doesn’t offer in-depth Android and iPad apps. In fact, Seesmic has been working ‘hand in hand’ with Salesforce’s mobile team to develop these native apps. And Salesforce is particularly bullish on the social enterprise of late—’Welcome To The Social Enterprise’ is the theme of Dreamforce this year. As Le Meur says, “We are working with Salesforce, not competing with the company.”

Of course, it is interesting that a Twitter-platform developer is shifting focus away from building for the consumer and focusing on the enterprise. In March, Twitter basically told developers to avoid competing with them on native clients. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t want developers to build off their platform, they just don’t want developers to build clients that mimic Twitter’s own services.

Thus, Seesmic has found a new user base in businesses. Le Meur explains that bringing mobile and social to the enterprise is the future for Seesmic. While the startup won’t give up its web and mobile apps (the company’s Android app has over a million users); all of Seesmic efforts are now fully ‘focused on bringing social to business users,’ says Le Meur.

Seesmic also shuttered its BlackBerry app a few months ago. You can watch Le Meur’s recent conversation with TechCrunch TV’s Andrew Keene here.

(Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington was an early investor in Seesmic.)