I spent a lot of time this week (unintentionally) tuned into Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s extremely enthusiastic – and extremely long – DreamForce keynote address and (intentionally) thinking about the implications of the company’s ‘biggest breakthrough ever’ which is destined to ‘revolutionize the workplace’. The announcement of Salesforce Chatter – the company’s newly announced Collaboration Cloud platform.
Yet here at SiliconANGLE, at what I consider to be the pre-eminent site for cutting edge thinking on everything ‘2.0′, I was surprised to find – nothing. Crickets. No chatter on Chatter.
My fellow Enterprise Irregulars have certainly had plenty to say. Paul Greenberg, Susan Scrupski, Dion Hinchcliffe, Dennis Moore and others were tweeting from the event, and both Brian Sommer and Michael Krigsman wrote relatively positive posts. Generally speaking, the thinking of the group from both public posts and private discussions seems to be that Chatter is well-positioned to be both a validation and a driver of mainstream adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
Yet, as Jennifer Leggio pointed out in a recent post, Chatter competitors such as Yammer have been in the market for some time but have seen weak – at best – adoption. And as Charlie Wood mentioned in a private Irregulars discussion, the idea of applications ‘chatting’ isn’t particularly new either – having been available for 
quite some time via RSS and other means, yet has met with lukewarm – at best – adoption.
Personally, I am anxious to see what adoption looks like – whether Chatter is really the validation of Enterprise 2.0 that many are looking for. As I mentioned in a Focus discussion this week, Salesforce.com has done a nice job packaging up Social capabilities around Enterprise applications (most notably, of course, their own). Chatter appears to have solved the ‘integration of point solutions’ barrier for enterprise social networking – now it’s just a matter of seeing who actually uses it.
Of course, there remains the barrier of cultural issues surrounding social networking in the enterprise – do companies really want to make it easier for the employees to access these networks – and what is the perceived value (positive or negative) of enterprise social networking?
Since Chatter won’t be in-market until next year, at this point all we have is chatter to decide whether it’s truly a big deal – or not.
So let’s have at it – what does the SiliconANGLE community think? Do you see your company actually using Chatter? Will it really ‘revolutionize how the enterprise communicates’? Does this announcement ‘validate’ Enterprise 2.0?
Or has Marc Benioff’s hyperbole exceeded the reality of ‘Enterprise 2.0′?
Is Chatter just chatter? Or is it for real?
Chatter from (and About) Salesforce.com is a post from: The SiliconANGLE
5 Comments
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At November 20, 2009, Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins wrote:
They’re doing a presentation on this over at the RTW conference right now. http://www.building43.com/realtime/2009/11/20/techcrunch-live-feed-the-real-time-crunchup/
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At November 21, 2009, John Furrier wrote:
I really liked the Chatter angle from them. It’s really early and could provide some great business intelligence in using real time data. Overall I thought it was very cool. The only issue I see is the relevence of the data. Salesforce being more of a business app the thing that jumps out to me is the “time sink” that this real time web offerers. Marc did show an interesting app where filtered twitter streams were presented along side other data (context) and I think that is a very good direction.
This real time stuff has to be simple and easy to use verses being a time waster.
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At December 1, 2009, Predictions for 2010: Chris Selland’s List « The SiliconANGLE wrote:
[...] Salesforce.com’s Chatter finally is released in Q3 and meets with modest user acceptance despite corporate concerns around [...]
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At December 1, 2009, Predictions for 2010: Chris Selland’s List wrote:
[...] Salesforce.com’s Chatter finally is released in Q3 and meets with modest user acceptance despite corporate concerns around [...]
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At December 1, 2009, Some Predictions for 2010 StockTwits Tech Blog wrote:
[...] Salesforce.com’s ($CRM) Chatter finally is released in Q3 and meets with modest user acceptance despite corporate concerns around [...]
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(Cross-posted @ The SiliconANGLE » Chris Selland)
I think comparing Chatter to Yammer misses the point a bit. There a few differences between Chatter and everything that has come before it: 1)Chatter is part of your enterprise apps and lets you collaborate in the context of what is happening in your business 2)Enterprise apps can chatter and spark conversations (sure there was RSS and alerts, but that’s like saying that Facebook isn’t anything new because you could email your friends) 3)Chatter is embedded in the platform meaning that every Force.com app is automatically chatterized. More thoughts at http://www.appirio.com/blog
I agree with you that Chatter > Yammer – as I mentioned Salesforce.com seems to have done a nice job of packaging this up and integrating into their platform.
But Salesforce has set expectations very high – it remains to see what enterprise adoption looks like (and we’ve got quite some time to wait until we start to see it). Certainly in some knowledge-intensive markets – such as professional services – I’d expect it to be quite strong. But I’m not sold that mainstream adoption is going to automatically take off – ‘collaboration’ has been a killer enterprise app for about 15 of the last 0 years.
Facebook has become powerful and popular because of the network effect – it’s not about technology, it’s about broad adoption. Same thing will – or won’t – happen here.