Salesforce.com sales force automation co-founder and CEO Marc
Benioff is sitting down with TechCrunch IT editor Steve Gillmor
and TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld to discuss the
socialization of the marketing automation enterprise. Benioff
recently unveiled his own social strategy for Salesforce.com:
Chatter. Debuted at the company’s Dreamforce seminar, Chatter
allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure,
private social network for their business.
Content, applications, workshops and people will now have
profiles, feeds and course groups within the platform, enabling
them to be connected via a unified stream. In addition,
developers will now be able to tap into Chatter’s API to build
social enterprise apps off of platform. While Chatter looks and
feels like a social network for the enterprise, Benioff is quick
to nix that moniker, preferring to call the platform a
collaboration tool.
Below find my notes (paraphrased):
ES: We’re here with Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com,
he’s had a few announcements the past couple days.
MB: We’ve had 19,000 people for our Dreamforce
convention. We had a successful announcement for a new product
called Chatter. It takes this thing Steve Gillmor calls
real-time and combines it with the enterprise. It brings in the
power of real enterprise computing. I’ve brought in Steve
Fisher, Chatter’s product lead from Salesforce.com and I’d like
to do a overview of Chatter.
—-video of Chatter—-
MB: Steve and I started a software company together, he
taught computer science at Stanford and worked at Apple.
SF: The core idea behind Chatter is bringing real-time
nature to enterprise, where its sorely needed. This provides the
context for sales CRM information in the stream. It not only
delivers a social application but also a platform and courses
for people to innovate off of. Chatter takes a database object
and turns it into a person and profile.
MB: Chatter is a social extension to the Force.com CRM
management platform.
SF: Any applications built on Force.com now had feeds
associated with it. When you are interested in a sales force
management application, you can see the feed for information. A
CRM services application can talk to a person, and people can
comment on this.
MB: As key tasks and activities happen in sales
automation applications, all are enabled with all features to
access Chatter.
ES: Chatter will be the new homepage?
MB: yes, it will be integrated into the new homepage
along with a dashboard of reports and approvals, workflow, tasks
and calendar. You’ll also be able to see filters as well.
Chatter will let you see updates from people, files,
applications, HR, and will integrated other Feeds (Dow Jones,
Thompson Reuters). A standard object, like a possible sale or
opportunity, is alive. You can comment on that and also builds
in relationships with other people on the deal.
Because it’s built on Force.com, security models are high-tech.
The idea behind real time sales CRM enterprise is to leverage
what we are learning from consumer world, ie what’s in Facebook
and Twitter, and then take the data of what’s in the enterprise
and make it relevant.
You can also workshop group users, and those groups can have a
profile or wall and set up Twitter feeds to track.
Robert Scoble: On that point, Salesforce.com is only used
by a small number of people inside corporations. Why aren’t you
ripping this out and make this more low cost?
MB: We are. All Salesforce.com users can use thus for
free. We also have a low- cost separate product. And we will be
rolling out a free version. We are working on figuring out what
that is.
ES: What is that going to called, Chatter Lite? This is a
new type of Stream?
MB: I feel that I’m a slave to email, to Outlook. But my
content management system is its own island of data. Twitter and
Facebook has shown that we can provide more context and meaning
to this information. Because there is an API that you can plug
into, if you are a data provider, you can plug into this. I love
software and I love technology. Chatter gives you meta data and
integrated data. Salesforce.com is becoming a type of
distribution network, not just an application and class
provider, so any app can plug into us to provide content to
Salesforce.com users. We can bring content to people via
Chatter.
MB: We’re not that far into it. We’re looking for
feedback. We have a general marketing automation strategy. We
think this a unique strategy. We need some new things besides
Microsoft Sharepoint. This is our fourth cloud.
ES: Do you think there’s going to more user interaction
with this application?
MB: We are looking to the consumer world to the things
that have been popularized like feeds, profiles and then add
computer technology, to create this for the sales force
management enterprise. We’re trying to implement real-time on
our sales CRM platform. We’re passionate about SaaS, but
collaboration are the next thing. And why should this only be on
the consumer side. Why can’t I follow my PowerPoint presentation
in seminars .
MB: We’ve completely integrated our sales force
automation software with Google Apps, Gmail, and more. When you
update your Google spreadsheet, it will show up in your feed. We
need to have deep relationships with Google, and other
companies.
SG: Congratulations! You are two years ahead of your
sales force automation competition.
MB: Chatter is deeply integrated into our sales force
management core. We have completely reworked our architecture to
become more real-time. I want to thank Steve Gillmor for this.
Source: Leena Rao
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Related: Salesforce.com CRM
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