Tag: enterprise

Salesforce Buys Dimdim for $31 Million

Salesforce.com announced that it has acquired Dimdim for $31 million. The acquisition will help Salesforce expand its Chatter line of products, often described as a "Facebook for the enterprise", with real-time communication technologies.

The company says the move follows the proven Facebook model of combining real-time collaboration.

"Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. "The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world’s most popular Internet site."

"From our start, Dimdim has focused on enabling real-time communication in the cloud, with no software," said DD Ganguly, CEO, Dimdim. "Salesforce.com gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise and align our vision of real-time, social enterprise software in the cloud – at a scale that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible."

DimDim was founded in 2007. Its current offerings let users host or attend live online meetings, demos and webinars using a web browser.

Salesforce says that with the acquisition, it is following Facebook’s lead again. The company really seems to want people to think of its products in Facebook terms.

January 6, 2011
Salesforce Chatter Mobile Goes to BlackBerry

Salesforce released Chatter Mobile for Blackberry. Chatter, if you’re not familiar with it, is the company’s social product, that’s often been referred to as a "Facebook for the enterprise."

"This new Chatter Mobile client gives you access to Chatter from your BlackBerry," says Salesforce’s Jason McDowall. "Salesforce’s Chatter Mobile will allow your users to stay on the pulse of their teams, accounts, and other important data in your organization."

Features include:

– View updates about the people, groups, and records you follow

– Create posts (with photos) and add comments

– View documents and links shared by others

– View your coworkers’ profiles, and email them directly

This version does not include people or group search, and there are no record detail views or administrative controls. You can’t restrict access from a BlackBerry device, nor can you impose a passcode.

Also, the version is only optimized for the BlackBerry Bold 9700, though it does work on some other models. It requires OS v5.0 or higher.

December 23, 2010
Salesforce Continues Big Week of Announcements

Salesforce continues to make big announcements as it hosts its Dreamforce event. So far, the company announced Database.com, Chatter Free, and the pending acquisition of Ruby platform Heroku. Now, the company has introduced Force.com 2 with five new services for building apps.

These services are Appforce, Siteforce, VMforce, ISVforce and Heroku. Appforce is designed to help companies deliver departmental apps, build forms, customize reports, design business processes, and make sure they’re all measurable.

Siteforce is for drawing pages, managing content, reusing pre-built website components. "Building websites today is slow and painful, with continual requests for new landing pages, new products and new campaigns," the company explains. "Additionally, website developers have no easy path to adding the social, mobile and real-time features required by enterprises today. Siteforce gives business users the tools to make simple changes and gives web developers the means to deliver powerful sites quickly."

VMforce is the result of a partnership with VMware, which is designed to help Java developers utilize the cloud more efficiently. Heroku is for Ruby-based apps, as discussed here. Finally, ISVforce is for building "multi-tenant cloud apps".

"ISVs are in a new world of opportunity, with more devices to support, rapid application development and update cycle demands, and a shift to the cloud development and delivery model," Salesforce says in a release. "ISVforce provides ISVs comprehensive application development services, trials and provisioning, automatic upgrade capabilities, the AppExchange cloud app marketplace, and a real-time console for monitoring customer usage and adoption. ISVforce puts all of these services, and the full power of multi-tenancy and salesforce.com’s trusted global service infrastructure behind every ISV app."

"With these five new services for building Cloud 2 apps, companies can quickly and easily accelerate every application development project on their backlog," said Salesforce EVP platform, marketing and corporate development, George Hu. "Force.com 2 is the enterprise cloud platform of choice because it delivers the fastest path to proven success for business, IT and ISVs."

Force.com costs businesses $25 per user per month. All of the new services will run on the recently announced Database.com service.

December 8, 2010
Salesforce Acquiring Heroku – Major Platform for Social Apps

It’s only Wednesday, but it’s already been a huge week for Salesforce. The company is hosting its Dreamforce conference, and has already introduced a free version of its "Facebook for the Enterprise" Chatter product, and launched Database.com to go head to head in the Database space with Oracle.

Now, Salesforce has announced that it is acquiring Heroku for about $212 million. Heroku is a cloud application platform powered by Ruby. In fact, according to Salesforce, it’s the fastest growing platform of its type.

The acquisition would make perfect sense for the company given its increased focus on social cloud-based enterprise apps. The platform powers over 106,000 social and mobile cloud apps. In fact, the company claims that developers added 2,600 new apps to the platform last week alone.

The company points out that there are over a million developers developing on Ruby, and that the language was used to write things like Groupon, Hulu, and Twitter.

"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. "Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

"We have a service that developers really love, and salesforce.com has the trust and credibility the most demanding customers expect," added Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian. "Together, we will provide the best place to run and deploy Cloud 2 apps. We believe this is the winning combination to bring cloud application platforms into the mainstream of the enterprise."

The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of January, and is subject to customary closing conditions.

December 8, 2010
Salesforce Launches Chatter Free, Announces Database.com

Back in the summer, Salesforce announced the general availability of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s cloud-based enterprise "social collaboration" app and platform, which a representative for the company once called "Facebook for the Enterprise."

In September, the company released Chatter Mobile, and announced Chatter 2, which includes a desktop app. Now, Salesforce has announced Chatter Free, which the company says will accelerate adoption of social collaboration throughout the enterprise.

With Chatter Free, any Salesforce user can invite colleagues to collaborate with Salesforce Chatter. "The industry’s reception of Salesforce Chatter has blown away our expectations," said CEO Marc Benioff. "The fact that more than 60,000 enterprises have deployed Chatter within the first five months is amazing and the Chatter Free social invites are going to take Chatter enterprise-wide."

"With Chatter Free, salesforce.com is using the same social invitation model popularized by Facebook," the company says. "Now any Salesforce user can invite any colleague — even those who aren’t already Salesforce users — to collaborate with Chatter. By its nature, this social invitation creates a network effect, as the pool of Chatter users widens and deepens across a company."

With Chatter, employees can follow documents, people, business processes, and application data. Features of Chatter Free include: profiles, status Updates, realtime feeds, file sharing, groups, filters, invitations, Chatter Mobile, and Chatter Desktop.

Chatter is included for free with all paying user licenses of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter Free is available to all employees of paying salesforce.com customers.

Also today, Salesforce revealed a new attempt to take on Oracle in the database market with Database.com, which includes a social data model, file storage, user management, authentication, and development tools. In the video above, SoftwareAdvice CEO Don Fornes interviews Salesforce’s Senior Director of Product Marketing Eric Stahl about database.com.

December 7, 2010
An Inside Look at How Microsoft Handles SEO Across its Massive Site

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November 30, 2010
Google Apps Gets Much More Useful to Businesses

Google has widely expanded Google Apps to incorporate many more of the company’s offerings so that businesses and other organizations can use and administrate them more efficiently. Before Google Apps users only had access to a few of Google’s products like Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, and a few others.

Google has changed its whole account infrastructure to allow Apps users to take advantage of many of Google’s other products that regular Google account holders have had access to. Businesses using Google Apps will now have access to the following services in addition to the core services previously available:

That’s actually not even the whole list. A complete list of Google services that will and will not be included is here. You’ll find that most are included. One thing missing from the new offering is the ability to purchase additional Google Storage, though Google says extra storage for Google Docs and Gmail will be available later this year.

Of course there is the Google Apps Marketplace as well, from which businesses can obtain access to third-party apps.

Now businesses can tie together corporate accounts for Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, AdWords, Feedburner, Google Reader, Checkout, YouTube, etc. The following video explains why this kind of thing might be useful:

"Coupled with the ability for administrators to provide different sets of applications to different groups of users, the possibilities for empowering workers in new ways are remarkable," says Derek Parham, Lead Software Engineer on Google Apps. "For example, you could equip your marketing team with Picasa Web Albums so they can collect and share photos from customer appreciation events, and let that team publish your company’s blog with Blogger. Services like iGoogle and Alerts, on the other hand, may be broadly useful, and could be enabled for your whole organization."

"Existing customers can transition at their own pace over the next couple months to the new infrastructure supporting these applications from the administrative control panel.," he adds. "New customers will automatically have the new infrastructure. The additional services are not covered by the Google Apps SLA or telephone support, but we’ll be watching for feedback how we can make these new applications even more useful."

Google has a guide for getting ready to transition to the new infrastructure here.

Google’s move to include all these services in Google Apps seems like an obvious one now that it’s been announced, especially considering Google’ huge push to get businesses using Google Apps, something the company has probably advertised more than any other product it has (it’s even taken out billboards for it).

Google Apps is bound to be a great deal more appealing to many businesses as a result. This might also turn out to be an important step in Google’s battle against Facebook. Clearly business use makes up a significant amount of Facebook use. Google intends to add a social layer to many of its own products. If those products are all part of Google Apps, which companies are already employing, that they may start to use these products and their respective social layers that much more.

Do you use Google Apps? If not, are you more inclined to now? Let us know in the comments.

November 18, 2010
Common Mistakes in Enterprise Pay Per Click

In another article we looked at large scale SEO with Bill Hunt. We also sat down with Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting at PubCon, who talked about enterprise PPC.

"There’s some things that change when you get to a very large account, whether it’s greater than 50k a month spend or greater than 100k a month spend, you know, whatever it may be," he tells us. "The campaigns tend to get very complex. You are going to have a very competitive environment. You’re going to have a need for some sort of bid management tool."

"Those tools aren’t enough," he adds. "You can’t just throw the tool in place, set it, and forget it. It doesn’t work that way. It requires a lot of work on top of that."

There are plenty of mistakes and misconceptions about enterprise PPC going around, and that means a lot of missed opportunities. "People don’t realize the way bid management tools work," says Enge. "They use algorithms (that’s probably fairly obvious) to do what they do, and if you think of like a single keyword that’s getting ten conversions a day, it’s pretty easy to measure how much you’re spending and whether you’re making money on it based on what you’re bidding."

"If you want to say you want an ROI of 200%…it goes and does it and you’ll be really close, but in my view, most of your keywords aren’t going to have enough data by themselves and smart solutions…do portfolio management to group them so they can treat groups of keywords as an entity and get something that’s manageable, but even after you’re done with all that, in my own estimate (and it’s not scientific, it’s really just kind of a gut feel thing) is if you go into your campaign and fish around, probably 30% of every bid you look at will be wrong," continues Enge. "It’s a statistical game, but as it turns out, if your goal is to have 200% ROI for your whole campaign, it will get you close to that."

More WebProNews Videos

"You’ve got to be prepared though for the fact that a lot of things will be out of whack," he warns. "And how you can help that and how you can drive it in a variety of ways…is by using human input. You can actually see things, and you can provide guidelines, so a very simple one is implementing negative keywords, which is a fairly obvious thing to do in pay per click, but a lot of people don’t do it."

"It’s really straightforward to do," he points out. "You just have to go into your account, and see which search queries are generating clicks, and you can look at it without any trouble – very quickly be able to recognize things that are generating volume of clicks, and your chances of getting conversion are bupkis."

"Ad optimization is another really big area that people overlook," he says. "What they have to get through their brain is…you have a bunch of smart people sitting in a room, they figure out what the ad is…you put it up…the chances that you picked the best ad…zero. The way you work on that is you test it."

That one might seem obvious too, but a lot of people just don’t do it. Testing can make a world of difference in just about every facet of marketing.

November 11, 2010
Salesforce Announces Chatter 2 with Adobe-Powered Chatter Desktop

Salesforce has just announced Chatter 2, the next generation of its Chatter product, which has often been referred to as "Facebook for the enterprise". The new version includes a number of new features, including a desktop app.

Salesforce’s Chatter Desktop is powered by Adobe AIR, and lets employees post updates, comments, files and links without opening a web browser, and displays pop-up alerts to instantly notify employees of important updates. It was built with Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com. Adobe tells WebProNews it was chosen by salesforce because its cross-platform runtime (it works across Mac, PC, desktops, and laptops) as well as AIR’s ability to provide a rich experience.

We asked about plans to take Chatter Desktop mobile, and while there is no announcement yet, Adobe says it’s "conceivable for the future" and that it would be "fairly easy to make mobile".

AIR itself currently supports iOS and will be shipping Android support shortly. Adobe plans to expand to additional mobile operating systems in the future, but would not get into specifics about that.

Of course Chatter Desktop is not the only thing new with Chatter 2. Other features include: Chatter Filters, Chatter Topics, Chatter Recommendations, Chatter Analytics, Chatter Files, Dashboard Chatter, Report Chatter, Activity Chatter, Chatter Central, Chatter Search, Chatter Email Manager, and Chatter Email Digest.

With these features, employees can quickly find and focus on relevant posts, associate updates with other posts and comments on the same topic, receive automatic suggestions of colleagues to fllow and groups to join, create reports and dashboards for analytics, store, update, and share documents, presentations, photos, and media files, follow and get dashboard updates in realtime feeds, follow reports, track progress of tasks, search across chatter feeds, and more.

Since launching Chatter into general availability three months ago, over 20,000 companies have deployed it. Chatter 2 features will be available with the Winter ’11 release, which is currently scheduled to be generally available October, 2010.

September 22, 2010
Google: 3 Million Businesses Have “Gone Google”

Google announced today that over 3 million businesses have "gone Google", meaning they’ve switched to Google Apps. in addition to that, Google says over 30 million individual users within businesses, schools, and organizations are using the company’s messaging and collaboration tools.

These are a couple of the announcements Google has made today as it hosts CIOs and IT professionals in Paris at its cloud computing event, Google Atmosphere. The company also announced two-step verification, which was discussed here, and mobile editing in Google Docs on Android and iPad.

The mobile functionality will be coming to users around the world in the next few weeks, the company says.

"Only cloud computing is able to deliver the whole package of productivity-enhancing collaboration, superior reliability and virtually unlimited scale at a price that’s affordable for any size organization," says Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise. "Our Atmosphere event is a nice opportunity to step back and fully appreciate the power of the cloud with customers and future customers alike."

Last week, Google Apps partner lead Scott McMullan shared some thoughts with us about growing customer interest in the Google Apps marketplace, which should only continue to increase interest in Google Apps itself. The Marketplace has over 200 installable apps. With the number of businesses using Google Apps growing, developers are likely to keep this number increasing as well.

September 20, 2010
Salesforce Announces Chatter Mobile

Salesforce has announced a mobile version of Chatter, its enterprise social networking platform. The product will be available for the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android and Blackberry.

The company points out that people who use Facebook through a mobile device are twice as active on the site than non-mobile users (according to IDC), and that mobile devices are beconing "the new enterprise desktop" for over 50% of the workforce. With these things in mind, Chatter Mobile should be a significant part of Chatter’s future.

"Chatter Mobile means you can know what is happening in your entire enterprise, wherever you are," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. "The combination of devices like the iPad or the new iPod touch with mobile apps like Chatter that push information to you in real-time are making the desktop obsolete."

Salesforce launched Chatter in June and there are already about 20,000 companies using it, according to Salesforce. In addition to that, Salesforce has already had 250,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and 100,000 from BlackBerry App World for its CRM apps.

Chatter Mobile is free to Salesforce CRM and Force.com subscribers. The apps will be available later this year for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. The Android app will be out in early 2011.

September 8, 2010
Salesforce Announces Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM

Salesforce.com has announced the arrival of Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM. This is a new crowd-sourced business data service for Salesforce CRM customers.

A spokesperson for Salesforce tells WebProNews today’s announcement is significant for the following reasons:

– Breadth: With Jigsaw Inside, sales and marketing professionals will get real-time access to the world’s largest socially generated database, including 22 million business contacts and 4 million company profiles.

– Depth: Jigsaw Inside for Salesforce integrates Jigsaw deeply into Salesforce Chatter for social collaboration and delivery of highly accurate information in real-time.

– Immediacy: Sales and marketing professionals can get real-time updates pushed to them whenever the business data they care about changes.

– Resolution: Companies spend more than $3 billion a year struggling to keep pace with changes across sales and marketing operations by augmenting legacy data services and data management. Jigsaw Inside will solve marketers’ pain points around decayed, duplicated and dead data by delivering relevant, accurate business information in the cloud without the need for hardware or software.

"CRM systems are only as good as the information inside them," said Kevin Akeroyd, general manager, Jigsaw. "With Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM, customers can be alerted to changes in contacts through Chatter in real-time. This degree of operational agility is only possible with Jigsaw’s data in the cloud."

Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is now generally available and starts at $29 per user per month.

Salesforce bought Jigsaw for $142 million earlier this year.

September 1, 2010
Google Apps Users Get New Mobile Security Options

Google has announced some new mobile device management options for Google Apps administrators. The options will be available to all Google Apps Premier and Education customers starting this week.

New options include:

– Requiring devices to use data encryption

– Auto-wiping device after specified number of failed password attempts

– Disabling the phone’s camera

– Ensuring old passwords are not reused

– Requiring passwords to be changed after specified time interval

– Disabling data synchronization when device is roaming to reduce wireless overage charges

"It’s our mission to provide users with seamless access to their data while allowing enterprise administrators to centrally manage a diverse range of mobile devices," says Google Software Engineer Dale Woodford. "We’re working to enhance our device management options and to expand our list of supported devices – including Android later this year."

The new options can be found in the "mobile" tab under the "service settings in the Google Apps control panel. More information on Google Apps mobile security settings can be found here.

July 14, 2010
Google, ITA Software Talks Causing Stir in Travel Industry

Reuters is reporting that Google is in discussions to buy ITA Software (which has been rumored for months), an airline IT and services provider. The company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and provides airfare info to airlines, travel agencies, and travel web services.

According to Reuters, there is a great deal of concern about such a deal among the travel industry. (hat tip: Greg Sterling).

Last week, Salesforce made Chatter available to everyone. This has been described as a "Facebook for the enterprise." It’s also been described as "more than just Facebook for the enterprise." Either way, the company has now published a Best Practices guide for using it.

UnwiredView.com reports on some alleged details and specs for the next (after FroYo) version of Android – Gingerbread.

MeeGo announced "Day 1" of the MeeGo proejct. The MeeGo handset baseline source code is now available to the developer community.

TechCrunch points to an interesting new service that launched from Appsfire. It’s called AppTrends, and it aims to rank iPhone apps based on how much people are talking about them on Twitter. This may not only be a good tool for discovering new and interesting apps, but it also illustrates a practical use of real-time search.

Microsoft has issued a reminder that its Windows Anytime Upgrade offer will come to an end on July 3rd. Engadget points to more details from Geek.com.

Apple’s iPhone 4 antenna issues have received a lot of press since the release of the phone. Most recently, there is a lot of discussion about Apple’s hiring of antenna engineers, a job posting that appeared the day people started complaining, as Engadget points out. Meanwhile, Boy Genius Report has an interesting article about Apple’s troubleshooting process.

I personally seem to have been caught in some “old experiment” of Google’s which is now preventing me from seeing Google’s recently rolled out interface in Firefox. While I can see it in other browsers, and until today could in Firefox, I am no longer able to see the new UI, and am instead presented with the old version of Google results pages (where I have to click a link to bring up the search options).

I asked Google about this, and Jake Hubert from the company’s Global Communications and Public Affairs division told me, “I’ve verified that what you are seeing is likely related to an old experiment. We have no plans to remove the left-hand panel.”

Has this happened to anyone else?

June 30, 2010
Yahoo Aims to Mainstream Hadoop with New Security and Workflow Offerings

Yahoo made a significant announcement at its Hadoop Summit today. The company says it’s made significant enhancements to the open source software, accelerating the potential for enterprise-wide adoption by mainstream businesses.

"Hadoop is where science meets big data – it’s the technical underpinning that powers our innovative consumer and advertiser products on the world’s most-advanced digital canvas," says Blake Irving, Yahoo Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer. "Yahoo!’s cloud and Hadoop make it possible for Yahoo! to rapidly personalize our content and advertising, and deliver highly relevant experiences, while maintaining the trust of our 600 million users."

Yahoo says Hadoop plays a key role in its home page, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and other properties.

"Businesses across all sectors are looking for ways to leverage the vast quantities of data they are accumulating, and Apache Hadoop is an efficient solution for processing data at scale," says Melanie Posey, research director at IDC Research. "Now organizations of various sizes can leverage Yahoo!’s Hadoop investment and deployments to run it on their own systems and build out their own Hadoop deployments without starting from scratch on internal science experiments."

Specifically, Yahoo announced the beta release of Hadoop with Security and Oozie, the company’s workflow engine for Hadoop. This means enterprises will benefit from better controls for managing business-sensitive data, according to the company.

The Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop with Security (beta) and Oozie are available through the Yahoo Developer Network.

June 29, 2010
Google Apps Gets Multi-Domain Support

Google has introduced multi-domain support in Google Apps. This comes in a new admin control that lets businesses and organizations with two or more domains on Google Apps manage them from a single control panel.

"Thousands of organizations deploy Google Apps every day, and a challenge for some large businesses has been migrating employees on multiple domains," says Google Apps software engineer Will Smit. "Until now, companies that ran into this issue could either set up other domains as domain aliases or set up different Google Apps accounts for each domain, neither of which was an ideal solution."

"Users belonging to different domains within an organization keep their domain-specific email address but can see coworkers from other domains in the organization’s global address book," says Smit. "It’s also easy for users to share across domains in Google Docs, Sites and the rest of Google Apps."

The feature is available immediately for all Google Apps Premier and Education edition users. There is no additional cost.

June 23, 2010
Salesforce Chatter Now Available to Everyone

Salesforce.com has announced the general availability of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s cloud-based enterprise "social collaboration" app and platform.

Chatter was introduced in November, launched in private beta back in February to 100 companies, and eventually expanded to over 5,000 customers.

"Salesforce Chatter is the most exciting thing I’ve worked on in my career," says Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "Delivering Chatter is a seminal moment and one that marks the arrival of Cloud 2."

A representative for Salesforce once called Chatter "Facebook for the Enterprise."In April, I spoke with Kraig Swensrud, senior vice president, product marketing, who told me, "Chatter is at the center of our entire strategy moving forward."

Naturally, this would then mark a very significant day for the company.

There is a new Chatter license, which Salesforce says unlocks the market potential for its technologies to be used by every customer employee. Features include:

– Profiles
– Status Updates
– Real-Time Feeds
– Content and File-Sharing
– Groups
– Ideas
– Read-only Access to Accounts and Contacts
– Limited Access to the Force.com Enterprise Cloud Computing Platform

Salesforce Chatter is free with all paying user licenses of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter-only user licenses are available for customers using Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition for $15 per user, per month.

June 22, 2010
SalesForce Launches ChatterExchange, Centers “Entire Strategy” Around Chatter

Back in November, Salesforce announced its Chatter product, which it referred to as Facebook for the Enterprise. It launched in private beta in February, and now Chatter is set to become integral to the very core of what Salesforce has to offer. I spoke with Kraig Swensrud, senior vice president, product marketing at Salesforce.com ahead of the announcement, who tells WebProNews, "Chatter is at the center of our entire strategy moving forward."

Cloud 2

Swensrud explained this concept of "Cloud 2", which is an internal term the company has been using, and basically refers to the next generation of cloud computing, which stems from the rise in general social media use and mobile/smartphone use, where people are accessing the Internet more from their pocket, as opposed to their desktop. Salesforce sees its strategy as "accelerating the market shift" to Cloud 2, which it says is "inherently social, collaborative and delivers real-time access to data and information across new mobile devices."

Swensrud tells us that since the company formed in 1999, they’ve been taking many of the leading trends on the web and applying them to the enterprise. Chatter is simply an extension of this. In fact, Swensrud says the company’s mantra now is along the lines of "Why doesn’t all enterprise software work like Facebook?"

Milestone

One announcement Salesforce is making today is that Chatter has achieved a new milestone of 500 companies in its private beta, with another 1,000 companies on the waiting list, and it will be coming to all customers later this year.

With the Force.com platform, users began using Facebook-style collaboration technology, Swensrud says, and users started thinking, "why don’t we have the same-style collaboration in all business apps – not just CRM app – basically, anything that runs inside of a company?"

That’s why Salesforce is allowing companies to build Cloud 2 apps with Force.com, Swensrud says. It will run all over the web and have all the features of Chatter. Companies can "Chatterize" any app they build with Force.com – Cloud 2 apps.

20 companies are going live with such apps right away.

AppExchange2 and ChatterExchange

Salesforce today is also introducing AppExchange2, a new version of its market place for cloud business apps, with a new category of social enterprise apps – the ChatterExchange, which will include the apps from the 20 companies and others that get built in the future. This can be found at appexchange.com/chatter

Service Cloud Goes Chatter

A big part of Salesforce’s announcement is that Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 is going Social with Chatter. The company has extended the Chatter private beta to more than 250 Service Cloud 2 customers. Salesforce says that in combining the Service Cloud and Chatter, companies can boost productivity gains by empowering service agents with new capabilities for:

– Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates

– Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company

– Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster

– SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet

– Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business

Swensrud says the companies in this private beta range in all sizes and across industries, with the largest being in the Fortune 500. ServiceCloud2, he says allows companies to not only communicate with customers via social networks and search engines, but when they receive customer inquiries, they can now use Chatter to work with all the departments within the company to sort things out.

Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Service Cloud 2 is available now and pricing starts at $65 per user per month. AppExchange 2 and ChatterExchange are live today, and customers should contact partners for pricing and availability of their applications.

April 8, 2010
Google Launches YouTube Channel To Showcase Apps Marketplace Additions

Google has launched a YouTube channel for its recently released Google Apps Marketplace. The Apps marketplace is a place where developers can create apps that integrate with Google Apps and sell them to users. According to Google, they can reach over 2 million businesses and 25 million users.

The YouTube channel should be a good place to checkout some of the apps that are available in the marketplace, and see what they can do.

"The Apps Marketplace YouTube channel showcases videos from Marketplace vendors," says YouTube’s Chris Kelly. "Ranging from funny to informative, from cartoons to screencasts, these videos are meant to convey the benefits of extending Google Apps with integrated apps that work seamlessly with Gmail, Calendar, Docs and more. We’re happy to already have more than a dozen videos in the channel and over 60 integrated app vendors in the Marketplace, and look forward to more great things as the Marketplace grows."

Here are a few sample videos:

The Apps marketplace is still young. It was only announced a couple weeks ago. Expect it to grow significantly, and hopefully this YouTube channel will continue to make for a good destination to check out some useful apps.

March 27, 2010
Would Your Company Benefit from an Internal Twitter?

It’s no secret that Google and Microsoft are in heavy competition in the enterprise application space. This competition may extend into a relatively new sub-category of this space – internal microblogging. Think Twitter, just for within the enterprise.

Now, Google Buzz isn’t exactly a Twitter clone, but you probably don’t have to look too far to see some similarities. Google said right when Buzz was announced that it would be making its way into the corporate environment eventually. "Within a few months, we also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within your organization," Google Enterprise Product Management Director said at that time.

Microsoft is testing a new product called OfficeTalk, which is much more of a Twitter clone than Buzz (right down to the 140 characters), but would essentially compete with Google’s internal version of Buzz in terms of basic functionality.

Microsoft explains OfficeTalk:

Ever wish you could share information broadly within your organization without emailing everyone? Ever wish you could keep the pulse of what people in your organization think is interesting? Microblogging has that potential. OfficeTalk is a concept test to explore the value of microblogging in the enterprise. OfficeTalk is deployed internally at Microsoft and has seen over 10,000 visitors and hundreds of messages posted daily. We’re now making OfficeTalk available to a few customers in a small pilot test. Because this is an early-stage concept, the OfficeTalk microblogging experience itself looks very similar to other well-known services. The key difference is that the enterprise owns the data since the OfficeTalk server is hosted in the customer’s organization.

While there could certainly be some practical uses for such a service, the idea of a corporate, internal Twitter-like service does not come without its skepticism. "Microsoft is testing a Twitter clone called OfficeTalk, which apparently combines Twitter’s corrosiveness to productivity with all of the stifled boredom your corporate intranet," says Valleywag’s Ryan Tate, for example. "Look, they copied the hashtags, follower counts and everything."

The skepticism isn’t lost on Microsoft’s Office Labs General Manager, Chris Pratley, however. "What we we’re seeing is that you can make these things, but it’s not automatic that people want to microblog in their organizations," he’s quoted as saying. They’re just testing the product with a handful of businesses for now.

Would your business use an internal Twitter-like service, whether it be Buzz, OfficeTalk, or anything else? Do you see this as a need? Share your thoughts.

March 24, 2010
Enterprises Seeing Increased Complexity at Data Centers

Symantec has put together its "State of the Data Center" report, which is the product of a survey of 573 businesses in 26 countries.

"Although mid-sized enterprises tend to evaluate and adopt new technologies at a faster rate than larger organizations, they still face similar data center complexities that are compounded by adopting new initiatives," says Deepak Mohan, senior vice president, Information Management Group at Symantec. "Standardizing on cross-platform solutions that can manage new technologies and automate processes will drive immediate cost reduction and make their jobs easier in the long run."

Symantec cites the following as highlights of the survey:

– Mid-sized enterprises are adopting new technology initiatives such as cloud computing, replication, and deduplication at 11-17 percent higher rates than small or large enterprises.

– Most enterprises have 10 or more data center initiatives rated as somewhat or absolutely important and 50 percent expect "significant" changes to their data centers in 2010.

– Half of all enterprises say applications are growing somewhat/quickly and half are finding it difficult and costly to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

– One-third of all enterprises say staff productivity is hampered by too many applications. Adding to the complexity is the continued increase in data causing 71 percent of organizations to consider data reduction technologies such as deduplication.

– Security, backup and recovery, and continuous data protection are the most important initiatives in 2010, ahead of virtualization. Eighty-three percent of enterprises rated security somewhat or absolutely important. Seventy-nine percent said backup and recovery is somewhat/absolutely important and 76 percent rated continuous data protection as one of their top initiatives.

– Staffing and budgets remain tight with half of all enterprises reporting they are somewhat/extremely understaffed. Finding budget and qualified applicants are the biggest recruiting issues. Seventy-six percent of enterprises have the same or more job requisitions open this year.

– One-third of disaster recovery plans are undocumented or need work and important IT components, such as cloud computing, remote office and virtual servers are often not included. Almost one-third of enterprises haven’t re-evaluated their disaster recovery plan in the last 12 months.

– Virtual machine protection continues to be a focus for enterprises, with 82 percent of enterprises considering virtual-machine technologies in 2010. Respondents cited granular recovery within virtual machine images as the biggest challenge in virtual machine data protection.

The security company recommends that businesses employ software that supports heterogeneous environments and eliminates islands of information, and deploy deduplication closer to the information source to eliminate redundant data and reduce storage and network costs.

Symantec also highlights the importance of disaster recovery planning, saying enterprises should seek to improve the success of testing by evaluating and implementing testing methods that are non-disruptive.

Related Articles:

> Google Preparing For Future With 10 Million Servers

> MySpace Tackles Data Center Costs

> Twitter Tops MySpace In UK, Spurs Data Center Expansion

January 11, 2010