Feb 22nd, 2010 |
Salesforce.com’s Chatter social computing service is now available to a limited number of private beta participants. Salesforce.com’s first shot across the social computing bow was fired back in November when they announced the service, now that the wraps are coming off we’ll see if Salesforce can compete against the likes of Microsoft, IBM, a plethora of emerging vendors, and even Cisco.
I think Chatter has the potential to be extremely disruptive. Salesforce brings some inherent strengths to the table, it’s arguably the most widely deployed software as a service, via the SaaS delivery model Salesforce can bundle Chatter with the services it’s already providing to end-user customers, in effect going around IT and undercutting more centralized attempts to bring social computing to the enterprise via stand-alone platforms such as Confluence, Jive, and SocialText, or as add-ons to collaboration tools such as SharePoint or the Notes/Domino/Quickr suite. Salesforce also points to the opportunity for its development partners to integrate Chatter into the tens of thousands of Force.Com developers, but to succeed Chatter must evolve beyond a Salesforce-based application and offer the opportunity to integrate into other collaboration applications. It must also overcome concerns related to compliance and security of storing potentially discoverable conversations in the cloud.
hmm social computing :)
Companies who integrate social media into their crm activities are going to be at the cutting edge and have an advantage over their competitors. Customers all over the world are tweeting about what they want and if they get it how it went. For companies who know how to properly monitor and leverage the growing use of social media they will be the winners.
True, chatter needs to evolve past that point, but I don’t see why it won’t be able to compete against the companies above. They (chatter) listen to demand and provide the supply.