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PrintThis week Salesforce.com unveiled Chatter -- "a new secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform."
This is a significant announcement that brings Enterprise 2.0 apps into the mainstream. Or will, when Chatter becomes available sometime in calendar year 2010. This strikes me as a freeze-the-market move designed to keep Salesforce.com customers from investing in enterprise social solutions from companies like Jive, Socialtext, Yammer, etc.
Chatter will include a decent assortment of common E2.0 features like profiles, status updates, and groups. [Yawn] Nothing particularly innovative based on the demo I saw.
But the power of tight integration comes into play when feeds are used to give status updates of applications and content changes. For example, a sales manager can be alerted when a important deal changes status. Another way for management to keep tabs on the sales reps, which is why they love SFA so much. But all sarcasm aside, this is an example of a true "social business" application that integrates Enterprise 2.0 functionality with SFA.
So why is this underwhelming? As usual, Marc Benioff hyped this announcement as the next big thing, but by all accounts it fell flat. I spent a few hours on the Expo floor and asked about a dozen people for their reaction to the Chatter announcement. "Underwhelmed" and "anti-climatic" where the two most common expressions. Not one person said the announcement was innovative or revolutionary.
It didn't help that the opening day keynote session started a half hour late and ran a half hour long, turning a two hour session into three. Some attendees walked out, either bored or needing to relieve their bladders. Kind of embarrassing and not very customer-centric, one attendee told me.
I'm underwhelmed because this is demoware being announced at a time when the E2.0 market is white hot. And while tight CRM integration makes good sense, the proposed pricing of $50 per user per month doesn't. For many companies, I think it will be more effective to integrate a leading best-of-breed Enterprise 2.0 solution. They'll get more functionality at 10% of the cost.
No doubt Salesforce.com will continue to work on Chatter. I do like this announcement because it validates the Enterprise 2.0 market, and demonstrates (literally) how social computing technology can be married to CRM systems. But for now my take is that the Chatter announcement mainly serves to buy Salesforce.com time to release a real solution while protecting its install base.
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