Last week at its annual user and developer conference, the Dreamforce Global Gathering, Saleforce.com announced the newest addition to its cloud-based portfolio, Chatter. As a bold first move into the enterprise collaboration software market, Chatter is a microblogging environment, similar to Twitter, which is built into the Force.com platform to “socialise” the applications and content hosted on it. The announcement is very much a trailer for the big event – the software will not be available until February when it will be rolled out on a limited basis to customers, with full general availability not until Summer 2010. However, it is significant for several reasons.
Firstly, the technology itself. Chatter provides the same people-based communication/collaboration opportunities that Twitter provides for the consumer market, and vendors such as Yammer provide for the enterprise market, with individuals able to post status updates and follow other users’ feeds. However, it is also designed to enable applications to contribute status updates that an individual can subscribe to, not just people’s status updates. As an example, you could subscribe to (or “follow”) all activity relating to a particular account in your CRM application, for example when an opportunity is added or progressed, or when a task is completed. It also supports groups, which enable a kind of team workspace focused around a particular issue, activity, client, etc. where group members can post relevant activity updates, share files and links, and view application updates relating to that update. It is this integration of application data which differentiates Chatter from tools like Yammer, giving some context to the collaboration, and the fact that the feeds are all embedded in the Salesforce dashboard/portal will make it much easier for organisations to quickly understand how this would be of benefit to them.
What is also significant is how bullish the company is about this latest move. In a European analyst briefing session, Tim Barker, Senior Director of Product Marketing in EMEA, was clear that Salesforce.com is looking to compete directly with the likes of IBM and Microsoft for a share of the collaboration software market, and that collaboration is the way to win enterprise buyers in the current market. Now as I’ve discussed many times, “collaboration” means many different things to many different people, but when business application vendors such as Salesforce are taking the market this seriously, and investing so heavily in this space, we can only expect to see things hotting up even further in this space.
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