Salesforce.com Chatter – Will it be the Facebook for the enterprise?

Back in November 2009 at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event CEO Marc Benioff announced Salesforce.com Chatter, which would allow companies to collaborate in real time within a private social network.

Later in December 2009 I got to see it with my own eyes at Cloudforce London during the 2-hour keynote presentation by Marc.    Within 3 months of this announcement it is already in private beta and expected to be available to all 70,000 customers during 2010.

So what is Salesforce Chatter?  Chatter is a unified system to collaborate with the people you work with, apps you work in and content you work on.  It takes the best parts of Facebook and Twitter with profiles, status updates along with ability to follow people and records providing you with a personalised news feed.  Chatter also lets you attach files like presentation you have been working on and link for a website or article. This becomes very powerful in a sales or service environment where Chatter will bring all that information together in one place and enable you to make better decisions.

Chatter is available in the browser like Salesforce.com but also expecting to see a presence on the desktop with an Adobe Air client and on the iPhone and BlackBerry as applications like Salesforce.com mobile.

Will it be the Facebook for the enterprise?   For companies using Salesforce.com across the organisation I think it is a must have and provides the enterprise privacy you can’t get on Facebook or Twitter and the clean integration with your customer records you can’t get with stand alone applications like Yammer.

(Screenshot of Salesforce.com Chatter on my Dev Org)

Some of the challenges I think we will see Chatter face in 2010 is adoption particularly within large global enterprises with only certain regions or division using Salesforce.com.   This may be a Salesforce.com strategy to grow its footprint in the organisation outside the Sales or Service division.

As Chatter develops over time I would be keen to see the ability to link Salesforce.com orgs together with Chatter, this could be really powerful where business have partnership and alliances with each other and need a secure and private way to collaborate.  It would also be great to see presence and voice on Chatter, showing you when your colleagues are available and initiating conference calls with them  and maybe customers is well.

Cloud Computing and my predictions for 2010

As it has been more then a month since my last post, I thought it would be a good idea switching directions from mobiles applications and taking a look at Cloud Computing.

So what is Cloud Computing? I think of Cloud Computing as a very general and broad term used in the technology industry for anything delivering hosted services over the Internet.

Characteristics normally include being on demand, elastic and fully managed which enables providing the user the ability for having as much service as needed without worry about infrastructure, support or maintenance.

Services provided by the cloud are usually split into three areas –

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), this is usually a service providing virtual servers and storage on demand.  Customer can pay for what they use and it becomes like a utility.  Amazon Web Services is a great example and leader in this space with EC2 which has a per hour pricing model.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is usually a set of development tools and software that is run on servers in the cloud.   Examples of PaaS providers include Force.com, Azure and Google App Engine.    A perceived factor challenging adoption of PaaS is Vendor Lock-in with proprietary development languages but for most this is already an issue for on-premise services anyway.  What is emerging to counter this is Open Platform as a Service – OPaaS that should address some of these concerns.

Software as Service (SaaS) provides the software on demand without the need to host your own platform or web server infrastructure on premise.  More and more businesses are moving to the cloud with CRM/ERP applications.  Salesforce.com is a leader in this space with over 10 years experience in the industry with its SaaS business model others have adopted.

So that should hopefully given you a quick and high level overview of cloud computing from my perspective and so here are my predictions for 2010 in this space –

1) First major outage in the cloud – after seeing gmail go down a few times last year we may see this happen to major cloud computing provider as they experience growing usage and constant platform innovation and refinement.  Even after a major cloud computing outage the service uptime should still beat on premise solutions.

2) Microsoft will become a more serious player in cloud computing – With the launch of Azure Platform and Office Web Apps some businesses might see Microsoft as an easy transition from existing desktop/on-premise services into the cloud.

3) Enterprise Cloud Computing Apps converge with Social Media Technology – 2009 has seen some announcements with Oracle Social CRM and Salesforce.com Chatter so as they are developed and launched this year we will see the real benefits of social media in business applications and further growth and innovation in this space.

4) Rise of the Vertical and Private Cloud – I think 2010 will be the year we see more government and public sector communities build their own cloud computing services.

So 2010 will be an interesting year for Cloud Computing which will continue to evolve faster then ever before and become fundamental to every businesses IT strategy.