Salesforce.com ramps Chatter beta; Launches social enterprise app exchange
Salesforce.com on Thursday expanded the beta of its Chatter application and launched an exchange built around the effort. The company also pitched a new concept, Cloud 2, which features social enterprise applications.
The move builds on the recent momentum of Salesforce Chatter, which has been described by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as a way to make the cloud more collaborative and social. This social cloud---Cloud 2---is going to be more transactional. In other words, your enterprise apps will be "followed" and interact with you as would a service like Twitter.
Add it up and Salesforce.com is pushing Cloud 2 (we'll overlook the fact that enterprises are still trying to get a feel for cloud 1). Cloud 2 will be more about social networking more than e-mail in the corporate world.
Benioff said in a statement:
"Salesforce.com is advancing the shift to Cloud 2, where productivity gains are going to come from real-time collaboration available on any device. We've seen the future of enterprise software, and it looks more like Facebook on the iPad than Yahoo on the PC."
The thing to really emphasize here is that apps and data will become more social with each other. With this view, Chatter is really more about automated processes than Facebook. Think of Chatter as an enabler of app to app connections in the enterprise similar to the machine-to-machine wireless communications that carriers see as a big growth market.
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Among the things Salesforce.com says Chatter will enable:
- Monitoring of business;
- Locating expertise;
- Real-time collaboration on cases;
- Managing service level agreements;
- Better customer service.
Chatter will be generally available sometime in 2010.
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