Salesforce.com takes the wraps off Chatter

22 Jun 2010

Chatter, the new social media communications tool that Salesforce.com wants to see transform the corporate world in the 21st century as email had in the 20th century, has arrived and is available for businesses to adopt.

The arrival of the new social collaboration tool, says Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, will create a new economy and opportunity for partners and developers to realise commercial success with Cloud 2 apps.

“Salesforce Chatter is the most exciting thing I’ve worked on in my career,” said Benioff. “Delivering Chatter is a seminal moment and one that marks the arrival of Cloud 2.”

Salesforce Chatter is a Cloud 2 app, which is social, mobile and real time that employees can use for collaboration across their company.

Leveraging the social features popularised by Facebook, Google and Twitter, like profiles, status updates and real-time feeds, Chatter empowers enterprises with a new level of productivity only possible in the cloud. 

Reaction to Chatter

Chatter was launched in private beta in February to 100 companies with rave reviews and was ultimately expanded to more than 5,000 customers due to overwhelming demand. With Chatter, employees and teams get immediate insight into their company’s programs, projects, people, customers, cases, documents and business data that is pushed to them, delivering new levels of social intelligence.

“Salesforce Chatter is nothing short of revolutionary for the enterprise,” said Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group.

“Salesforce Chatter creates an entirely new way to work for employees by opening up lines of communication and ad hoc co-ordination across every level of an organisation. Enterprises can now realise new highs in productivity by harnessing the power of social collaboration,” Pombriant said.

Benioff said companies are making the shift to Cloud 2, the next generation of enterprise cloud computing which is social, mobile and real time.

Cloud 2 started with consumer social networking sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter that people use everyday to be connected and collaborate around what matters most to them in their personal lives.

Increases in productivity

Within weeks of deployment, Salesforce.com customers in the Chatter private beta reported tremendous productivity gains. Based on their experiences, 90pc of participants surveyed indicated they would recommend Chatter to others.

Specifically, these customers reported a 27pc increase in collaboration and a 22pc improvement in productivity with Chatter.

More than 1,300 Salesforce.com partners and 250,000 Force.com developers have been invited to become part of the social enterprise vanguard.

The Chatter capabilities of the platform enable each one of the more than 160,000 custom Force.com applications to instantly become social, real time and accessible on mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone. Force.com developers can build collaboration apps by adding capabilities like status updates, profiles, and real-time feeds to their custom cloud apps.

Salesforce.com partners and developers are moving swiftly to take advantage of the burgeoning Cloud 2 economy. In April, Salesforce.com launched the ChatterExchange to broaden the solutions customers can try and buy from the AppExchange to extend the benefits of cloud computing with social-enabled enterprise technologies.

The partner and developer community have already delivered more than 60 collaboration apps that are now listed on the ChatterExchange.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com