This is a cross-blog post from Network Solution’s Solutions Are Power website that I guest wrote. Originally posted on SolutionsArePower.com on November 18, 2009.
I’m sitting here at the 2009 edition of the Dreamforce Conference to listen to the CEO of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, talk about his thoughts about the cloud and listen in to any potential announcements that he may have about the company and their highly successful product.
And without disappointment, it turns out that Salesforce is rolling out what they’re calling their “biggest breakthrough ever”: Salesforce Chatter.
According to their release, Salesforce Chatter is the “first social computing application and platform for real-time enterprise collaboration.” It will apparently revolutionize how social networking models will shape the workplace. Of course with social networking, Salesforce has opened up their platform to allow for developers to create their own custom or third-party application.
Not really surprised that Salesforce.com would wind up opening up their platform to support third-party applications. This coming on the heels of PayPal’s inaugural conference where they too also unveiled that they were opening up their platform for developers to experiment with and create outstanding products. This could potentially be a good thing for the company that just announced their third quarter results that they said would exceed $1.3 Billion – a 20% increase from last year.
With a customer base of nearly 68,000 people, Salesforce.com must have been constantly asked about whether they would be integrating social media into the mix and also about whether they’d be opening up their API and the first enterprise cloud computing company has responded with a resounding “YES”. As it relates to real-time collaboration, Salesforce will allow companies to share information through the use of profiles, status updates, feeds, groups, social apps & content, integration with Twitter and Facebook and even have it be available on mobile platforms!
The big question is when will this become available and how much will Salesforce Chatter cost customers? It seems that they’re going to release this new program to everyone in 2010 and those who have purchased Salesforce.com applications will need to make purchase decisions from the inital set of features currently available? But it seems that if you’re paying for the CRM and Force.com access, you’ll be able to get Salesforce Chatter included. Or, if you just want to get a new Chatter Edition, just pay $50 a month per user which will also include Salesforce Chatter, Content & Force.com.
More information can be found at Force.com.
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