Chatter Represents SFDC’s Unified Move Into Social

Announced at the 2009 Dreamforce conference, Chatter represents both a collaboration application and platform.  Software built on the Force.com platform will gain the collaboration capabilities.   Solutions in AppExchange will be able to use profiles, real time streams, and other API’s.   With a 100 customers testing out user experience, scalability, and security, Salesforce.com, moves from vaporware to beta.   Some key features include:

• Aggregating streams of information. Employees can subscribe to feeds such as internal updates, social networks, and documents.
• Automating status updates. Users can receive updates from system and user generated alerts.  Alerts can include documents and related links.
• Enabling secure document sharing. Chatter feeds can be searched to find relevant information.  Document sharing is protected by a secure sharing model from the Force.com platform.

The Bottom Line For Customers – Chatter Represents A First Step Towards Social CRM

Customers seek solutions that bridge the gap between Enterprise 2.0 collaboration with enterprise applications.  Investment in solutions like Chatter fit well with Salesforce.com’s existing list of innovative customers.   Many require more in-depth social capabilities.  Should Chatter be delivered in 2010, customers will win by being able to minimize the number of SaaS platforms,  reduce the related costs of vendor management, and take a first step into Social CRM.

The Bottom Line For Vendors – Chatter Beta Buys Salesforce.com Time To Fend Of Best of Breed Competitors.

Learning from the lessons of Siebel, Marc Benioff does not intend for SalesForce.com to be a one trick pony.  Force.com represented a step to build an ecosystem and extend beyond CRM.  Success in AppExchange proves out the strength of the ecosystem. With Chatter, Salesforce.com establishes a second foothold into the world of Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0.  The pre-announcing in November bought Salesforce.com time to fend off best of  breed collaboration solutions and emerging Social CRM vendors.  Announcing a private beta with 100 customers, not only shows momentum, but also gives Salesforce.com time to prove out the solution.  In any case, they SaaS leader buys time and can keep some of the best of breed solutions temporarily out of its accounts.

Your POV

Are you a Salesforce.com customer?  How will you use chatter?  When do you plan to deploy.  Let us know if you need help with:

• Building a multi-vendor SaaS strategy
• Negotiating your Salesforce.com contract
• Crafting a SaaS integration strategy

Please post or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwaresinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity.

Related resources and links

20100125 Monday’s Musings: The Hidden Value in SaaS Deployments

20091222 Tuesday’s Tip: 10 Cloud and SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010

20091012 Research Report: Customer Bill of Rights – Software-as-a Service

20090602 Tuesday’s Tip: Now’s The Time To Consider SaaS Software Escrows

20081028 Tuesday’s Tip: SaaS – Integration Advice

20090714 Sandhill.com – R ‘Ray’ Wang – “Opinion: Moving to a SaaS Offensive”

20070903 Trends: What’s all the fuss about True SaaS, OnDemand, Hosting?

20091208 Tuesday’s Tip: 2010 Apps Strategies Should Start With Business Value

20091109 Monday’s Musings: SaaS, SOA, Integration and How To Make A Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich In The Cloud

Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

This post was co-written with Jeremiah Owyang, Partner and Colleague at Altimeter Group

Above: Pictures from Salesforce’s event

Salesforce.com launches a new set of social apps that make CRM connected to the social web. So what does it mean?

Salesforce.com’s Twitter integration and application launch helps brands monitor what’s being said. Yet despite the fanfare, the application lacks a pre-determined way to identify the profiles of Twitter profiles and primary keys within the CRM database. Secondly, the system doesn’t provide a default setting to prioritize the influence (such as more followers) vs a profile with few followers -limiting the ability for brands to prioritize their support offerings.

Salesforce.com’s “Answers” product is a threat to community platforms that offer support-heavy features. Vendors like Lithium (although a SF partner) Jive, Telligent, Awareness, and Mzinga are impacted. Brands that have a strong Salesforce.com implementation will first look to their CRM vendor for social support offerings -reducing the pipeline for community platform new comers. The newly minted “Knowledge” product, which harvests the IP from customer service reps, and customers themselves is also a direct threat to wiki creators such as SocialText, Atlasian. Those vendors should quickly bolster their marketing efforts to demonstrate how they are differentiated. Client server based contact center products such as Amdocs, Cisco, and Genesys, will face increased competition as business users choose to move to platforms that deliver provide greater social aspects tied to user generated content.

Despite Salesforce.com’s technical announcement, this doesn’t mean success for their customers. Technology is only 20% of any enterprise change, the other 80% is culture, process, roles, and strategy change -key requirements that Salesforce.com is not equipped to provide. As a result, don’t expect customers that don’t have the right program in place to take advantage of these technology offerings -instead expect vendors with a heavy professional service offering to empower a company to truly embrace customers in the social web.

Overall, Salesforce.com is above and beyond other CRM vendors in terms of connecting to the social web. Yet despite their ability to connect with new channels, they lack a full solution to empower brands to make the cultural changes within their organizations. Expect other CRM vendors such as Oracle’s Social CRM offerings and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to do a “me too” in coming months as others jump on the social CRM bandwagon.

For the CIO: Ray’s Take: The coming wave of social CRM initiatives and cloud based service solutions require CIO’s to rethink about their overall apps strategies to support hybrid deployment options. Rapid proliferation of SaaS solutions inside the organization requires strong CIO leadership in coordinating data, business process, and meta data integration strategies. Moreover, now will be the time to begin master data management activities that will support social CRM initiatives and resolve profile identification and entity resolution issues. Take control now or lose control forever.

For the CMO: Jeremiah’s Take: Marketing has spread beyond awareness and lead generation -support IS marketing. Yet to be successful, your internal processes must quickly meld PR and support to provide a seamless experience to the customer. Be proactive, not reactive: Use brand monitoring technologies to head off issues before they volcano into PR disasters.

Your POV

Ready to put your service strategy to the test with Salesforce.com’s Answers product or another social CRM tool? Where are you today in your efforts?  Post your comment here or reach me direct at r at altimetergroup dot com or r at softwareinsider dot org.

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.