Salesforce.com CEO Benioff: Social Networking Meets The Enterprise in Cloud 2

Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff, speaking in New York at the company's Cloudforce 2 event, once again emphasized the emerging confluence between social networking, mobility and enterprise computing. Benioff described it as "the era Cloud 2, where social networking use has surpassed e-mail, Facebook and YouTube use have outpaced search, and new mobile devices like the iPad are creating entirely new ways to interact with information."

Moreover, he claimed computing is entering a new 10-year phase that will redefine how customers, employees and partners interact with one another through real-time collaboration. Underscoring Benioff's directive that companies need to embrace this era where enterprise software "looks more like Facebook on the iPad than Yahoo! on the PC" he announced AppExchange 2 which includes ChatterExchange, a new marketplace for developers and customers related specifically to Chatter, and Aloha Apps, "a new “all-you-can-app” category of apps that don’t count against customer org limits (apps/tabs/objects), no matter which Salesforce.com edition you’re using."

One of Salesforce.com's key partners, FinancialForce.com, a provider of on-demand SaaS financial and accounting software, showed off its Chatter application. Digging into the implications of it was Dennis Howlett in a ZDNet article. He concluded:

"For me this is the first potentially large scale business use case of social computing where the direct integration between applications has genuine business meaning. As such, it is a significant change in what design thinking based applications might look like in the near future. When viewed objectively, this is not about co-mingling functions but about real world business problem solving capability".

Benioff even took time to show TechCrunch his new iPhone app for Chatter. You can see the video here.