Live From Dreamforce: Benioff Launches Enterprise Collaboration Platform

Marc Benioff, Saleforce.com's Chairman and CEO, today described what he called the company's biggest and most exciting announced in the ten-year history of the cloud computing pioneer. Salesforce Chatter, described as a next-generation collaboration platform, leverages social networking concepts and tools and gives the company its first enterprise-wide application. Benioff described Salesforce Chatter as a collaboration platform that connects content, applications and people in real time and brings "the magic of Facebook and Twitter...to your enterprise."

Salesforce Chatter is meant to bring social networking into the enterprise and "allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their enterprise." Taking cues from Facebook and Twitter, Saleforce Chatter provides a way for conversations and real time updates to occur within a company based on its security and privacy protocols.

Because its built on Force.com, the company's infrastructure and application development platform, it enables developers to leverage Salesforce Chatter as a platform for building "social enterprise applications". It also allows social networking tools to run natively within Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2, the company's on-demand SaaS solutions for customer relationship management and customer service, respectively. Moreover, all the 135,000 applications that have been built on Force.com "will instantly become social."

Salesforce Chatter is set for release in early 2010. Benioff wants to position the solution as a next-generation collaboration platform, something he stressed later in a briefing with press and analysts. He was guarded - or about as guarded as he can get - when asked what he thought the potential was for the new solution. He called Chatter critical to the company's success because it is a differentiator as it "puts more data into their service" thereby giving the company something of a "killer app" for the enterprise. Equally important, Salesforce Chatter can act as an "accelerator" for company-wide adoption of their products. Benioff described the revelation he saw with Facebook and Twitter and wanted to marry that with enterprise scale, security and reliability that comes with Force.com.

Time will tell if Salesforce.com has indeed delivered a killer app for the enterprise. Could it herald the next wave of cloud computing adoption? Something that pushes it not only into the mainstream, but widely throughout the enterprise? It certainly got people talking and excited about the future it. One customer I talked to, who leads the IT department of a very large consumer goods company, thought it had the potential to be revolutionary. It certainly kicked off this latest iteration of Dreamforce with a very, very loud bang.