Salesforce Chatter Promises to Take Enterprise 2.0 to the Next Level

Salesforce.com today announced “a new secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform”, called Chatter. While it will not be available until an unspecified date in 2010, Chatter will likely raise the bar for Enterprise 2.0 software, because of the promised ability to embed its functionality into other enterprise applications.

Chatter includes many of the social components that are the core of existing Enterprise 2.0 software offerings: Profiles, Status Updates, Feeds, Groups (Communities), etc. What is different — and significant — about Chatter is that any of those components can be integrated inside any existing enterprise application, including Salesforce CRM and the 135,000 custom applications built on the Force.com platform. In short, Salesforce.com will not make users collaborate through the Chatter interface; they will be able to leverage Chatter’s social functionality in the context of work that they are doing inside a CRM, ERP, or other enterprise system.

The ability to deploy social functionality as a service within an existing (or new) enterprise application is a game changer. To-date, only one other E2.0 software vendor that I am aware of (MindTouch) has been able to make that claim. Salesforce.com is the first proprietary software provider with a very large set of enterprise customers and third-party developers to offer social functionality as building blocks (services) that can be consumed in other, independent applications.

The Enterprise 2.0 crowd has been focused on adoption in 2009 and has recently begun to realize that integration of social functionality into existing and new enterprise applications and platforms will be key to increasing adoption (see my previous posts on this topic: Thought of the Day: September 17, 2009 and The Impending Enterprise 2.0 Software Market Consolidation). Salesforce.com’s announcement of Chatter begins to make that vision a reality, and at scale.

Two other aspects of Chatter demand attention. First, at a time when established Enterprise 2.0 software vendors are touting their ability to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint (see my previous post, Integration of Social Software and Content Management Systems: The Big Picture), Salesforce.com has chosen to provide integration with Google Apps instead. Salesforce.com will use the Google Data APIs to enable data communication between Chatter and Google Apps. This is hardly a surprise, given that cloud computing is core to both companies.

The other striking aspect of Chatter is its embrace of popular consumer social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter. This occurs at a time when many organizations are blocking employee access to those tools for security, privacy, and productivity reasons. Salesforce.com already features bi-directional communication between its Force.com platform and Facebook, having launched the Force.com for Facebook developer toolkit a year ago. Now Salesforce.com is providing a similar developer toolkit for Twitter.

Chatter is an announced offering, not a shipping product. As such, it is already being compared to Google Wave in the collaboration market. However, Chatter is much more likely to make a significant impact in the E2.0 space, because Salesforce.com has always been focused on enterprise customers, while Google’s offerings started as consumer products and have only recently begun to slowly gain traction within enterprises. Google may bring Wave out of beta before Salesforce.com launches Chatter, but I expect that will make little difference as to which one sees better enterprise adoption in 2010. It is very likely that more organizations will understand Chatter’s value proposition of easily integrated social functionality.

The Impending Enterprise 2.0 Software Market Consolidation

Talk about a trip down memory lane…  Another excellent blog post yesterday by my friend and fellow Babson College alum, Sameer Patel, snapped me back a few years and gave me that spine tingling sense of deja vu.

Sameer wrote about how the market for Enterprise 2.0 software may evolve much the same way the enterprise portal software market did nearly a decade ago. I remember the consolidation of the portal market very well, having actively shaped and tracked it daily as an analyst and consultant. I would be thrilled if the E2.0 software market followed a similar, but somewhat different direction that the portal market took. Allow me to explain.

When the portal market consolidated in 2002-2003, some cash-starved vendors simply went out of business. However, many others were acquired for their technology, which was then integrated into other enterprise software offerings. Portal code became the UI layer of many enterprise software applications and was also used as a data and information aggregation and personalization method in those applications.

I believe that much of the functionality we see in Enterprise 2.0 software today will eventually be integrated into other enterprise applications. In fact, I would not be surprised to see that beginning to happen in 2010, as the effects of the recession continue to gnaw at the business climate, making it more difficult for many vendors of stand-alone E2.0 software tools and applications to survive, much less grow.

I hope that the difference between the historical integration of portal technology and the coming integration of E2.0 functionality is one of method. Portal functionality was embedded directly into the code of existing enterprise applications. Enterprise 2.0 functionality should be integrated into other applications as services (see my previous post on this subject.) Service-based functionality offers the advantage of writing once and using many times.  For example, creating service-based enterprise micro-messaging functionality (e.g. Yammer, Socialcast, Socialtext Signals, etc.) would allow it to be integrated into multiple, existing enterprise applications, rather than being confined to an Enterprise 2.0 software application or suite.

The primary goals of writing and deploying social software functionality as services are: 1) to allow enterprise software users to interact with one another without leaving the context in which they are already working, and 2) to preserve the organization’s investment in existing enterprise applications. The first is important from a user productivity and satisfaction standpoint, the second because of its financial benefit.

When the Enterprise 2.0 software market does consolidate, the remaining vendors will be there because they were able to create and sell:

• a platform that could be extended by developers creating custom solutions for large organizations,
• a suite that provided a robust, fixed set of functionality that met the common needs of many customers, or
• a single piece or multiple types of service-based functionality that could be integrated into either other enterprise application vendors’ offerings or deploying organizations’ existing applications and new mashups

What do you think? Will history repeat itself or will the list of Enterprise 2.0 software vendors that survived the impending, inevitable market consolidation consist primarily of those that embraced the service-based functionality model?

Box.net Offers Proof of Its New Enterprise Strategy

Box.net announced today that it has integrated its cloud-based document storage and sharing solution with Salesforce.com. Current Box.net customers that want to integrate with Salesforce CRM can contact Box.net directly to activate the service. Salesforce.com customers may now download Box.net from the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

Box.net services will now be available in the Lead, Account, Contact, and Opportunity tabs of Salesforce CRM. In addition, the Box.net native interface and full range of services will be accessible via a dedicted tab on the Salesforce CRM interface. Users can upload new files to Box.net, edit existing files, digitally sign electronic documents, and e-mail or e-fax files. Large enterprise users will be given unlimited Box.net storage. The Box.net video embedded below briefly demonstrates the new Salesforce CRM integration.

While Box.net started as a consumer focused business, today’s announcement marks the first tangible manifestation of its emerging enterprise strategy. Box.net intends to be a cloud-based  document repository that can be accessed through a broad range of enterprise applications.

The content-as-a-service model envisioned by Box.net will gain traction in the coming months. I believe that a centralized content repository, located on-premise or in the cloud, is a key piece of any enterprise’s infrastructure. Moreover, content services — functionality that enables users to create, store, edit, and share content — should be accessible from any enterprise application, including composite applications such as portals or mashups created for specific roles (e.g. sales and/or marketing employees, channel partners, customers). Users should not be required to interact with content only through dedicated tools such as office productivity suites and Content Management Systems (CMS).

Other content authoring and CMS software vendors are beginning to consider, understand, and (in some cases) embrace this deployment model. Box.net is one of the first proprietary software vendors to instantiate it. Adoption statistics of their new Salesforce CRM integration should eventually provide a good reading as to whether or not enterprise customers are also ready to embrace the content-as-a-service model.