Salesforce announces Chatter 2
Less than six months after the release of Salesforce's corporate social-networking platform, Chatter, the customer relationship software provider is set to release its sequel, the aptly named Chatter 2.
Jeremy Cooper, regional vice president of marketing for Salesforce Asia-Pacific, said that the region was Salesforce's fastest growing market.
"Customer numbers have grown to around 82,000 worldwide, with the strongest growth region being the Asia-Pacific."
Some of the new features include a Chatter Central tab, which brings in a way to monitor and manage incoming feeds and information, as well as a recommendation engine for new followers and feed filtering of groups and projects.
Chatter 2 also embeds an analytical dashboard into the environment, as well as a way to find new opportunities and deals to follow.
Cooper said that Salesforce originally modelled its enterprise software development strategy on Amazon.com, asking itself why customer relationship management techniques couldn't be as simple as using the online shopping site.
"Over the last 12 months, we have observed the 'megatrends' starting to make their way into the market. Amazon is no longer the lighthouse in terms of enterprise software development, as Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we use the internet," Cooper said.
"At the end of last year, the number of people collaborating on social sites surpassed the number of people using email globally. We're now asking ourselves 'why isn't all enterprise software just like Facebook'?" he added.
Chatter embodies much of Salesforce's new "Cloud 2" vision.
Salesforce's Cloud 2 strategy looks to capture the "new method" around how people are getting their information online, with a specific push towards the mobile collaboration space.
As a result, Chatter 2 will launch onto every major mobile device at launch, including iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android platforms.
Chatter was first released on 22 June, with 20,000 customers signed on within the first 90 days.
According to Salesforce, all existing Chatter customers will be upgraded to Chatter 2 at its release in October.