Salesforce: Cloud is strong, Chatter is growing

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, always a colorful character, apparently didn't get the memos from Wall Street about Chatter getting off to a slow start or a rough economic environment on the horizon. No, to hear Benioff tell the story, everything is just hunky dory out there on the Salesforce cloud.

Chatter was the one of the big talking points during the Salesforce analysts' conference call last Thursday, with Benioff taking the reins right out of the gate to squash any concerns that Wall Street might be having about it. In a preview of Salesforce earnings earlier this week, Larry Dignan highlighted some concerns about Chatter among Wall Street analysts. But here's Benioff's take as he presented it during the conference call:

"Customer response to Salesforce Chatter has been nothing short of amazing. Within a week of the release, more than 10,000 customers had turned on Salesforce Chatter. Today, less than two months later that number has now grown to nearly 20,000 customers or roughly one quarter of our total customer base. We believe this is the most successful new software released ever. Not only does Chatter make our Sales and Service Cloud apps better, but when our customers talk about it, they are using words like amazing, exciting, fun, revolutionary, not words typically used to describe enterprise software and that's why we believe Salesforce Chatter is the next killer app from Salesforce.com."

Read more of "Salesforce: Cloud is strong, Chatter is growing and guidance is up" at ZDNet.