Salesforce.com is encouraging enterprises to get chatty with the release of its Chatter cloud-based enterprise social-collaboration platform. Analysts said this could signal an impending wave of similar solutions in industries beyond Customer Relationship Management (CRM) because Chatter creates opportunities for developers to build and resell apps that include the platform.
Chatter leverages familiar social-networking features from Facebook and Twitter, including profiles, status updates, and real-time feeds. The platform lets enterprises collaborate around documents, but it also lets employees “follow” people, business processes, and application data. The goal is to boost business intelligence by driving real-time insights into programs, projects, people, customers, cases, documents and business data.
“Salesforce Chatter is nothing short of revolutionary for the enterprise,” said Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group. “Salesforce Chatter creates an entirely new way to work for employees by opening up lines of communication and ad hoc coordination across every level of an organization. Enterprises can now realize new highs in productivity by harnessing the power of social collaboration.”
What is Cloud 2?
Salesforce Chatter is a Cloud 2 application. Much like Web 2.0, Cloud 2 is the next generation of enterprise cloud computing, which is social, mobile and real time. Familiar Cloud 2 applications include Facebook, Google and Twitter. But Chatter is the first Cloud 2 collaboration application for the enterprise.
Farmers Insurance is one of about 100 beta testers for Chatter. The insurer has multiple stakeholders working on different aspects of its marketing strategies — and Chatter fits the solutions bill, said Mitch Varhula, marketing consultant at Farmers.
“With Salesforce Chatter, the advertising department has increased collaboration across marketing initiatives and improved service levels to our internal customers of more than 14,000 agents,” Varhula said. “What’s been most amazing about Chatter is how it leverages a secure platform with a trusted sharing model to…