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Collaboration dominates at Cloudforce London
Thursday, September 9, 2010 by Angela Ashenden
Yesterday Salesforce.com’s customer, partner and media event, Cloudforce 2010, took place in London, drawing an impressive 3,000 or so attendees – all the more impressive given that the company changed the date only a week in advance in order to avoid clashing with Tuesday’s London Tube strike.
The event itself was the first since the company released its Twitter-like collaboration service, Salesforce Chatter, in June, and not surprisingly Chatter played a central role in CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote, as well as other press and analyst sessions during the day. I have already written about the capabilities and positioning of Chatter as well as the opportunities it offers to customers and partners (see my Vendor Insight report – Salesforce.com spreads its wings with Chatter), but what I found particularly interesting during the event was the way that Chatter has now wound itself around all aspects of Salesforce.com’s marketing and positioning, with customer stories all referencing their take on (and use of) Chatter.
One of Chatter’s major differentiators over other collaboration software competitors is its combining of people’s own status updates and comment threads with notifications from Salesforce.com applications and other apps hosted on the Force.com platform. And this seems to be where most of the company’s partners see the opportunity with Chatter – leveraging Chatter as an interactive notification system, enabling collaboration to take place in the context of an application activity or event.
Another effective message which is being presented is the embedding of the Chatter capabilities as part of an existing process – for example the process of escalating an opportunity risk which automatically adds managers to the Chatter group focused on that opportunity so that they are notified and can provide input. The advantage of such examples is that it helps organisations to understand how the technology can be of value in a practical sense – something which is often lacking in social software marketing propositions.
With the product only released two months ago, I had few expectations of hearing about new capabilities or the product roadmap, however today’s event was accompanied by the announcement of new mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Android platforms. There were also a few tasters about the next version of Chatter, which is due for release in October, and which will include some new analytics capabilities as well as more practical support for customers about how to go about supporting the roll out of the Chatter technology.
It is of course still early days for Chatter, with Salesforce’s communication placing heavy emphasis on selling the strengths of the new offering, while customers are still learning about how best to use it. But even taking that into account, it is clear that Salesforce.com sees Chatter as more than a new product – it represents a new direction for the company, and brings a whole host of opportunities going forward.
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Posted in Collaboration