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Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference ended just over a week ago, and aside from two new service-desk integrations on Force.com, the big news was about Salesforce Chatter. Yes, the “Facebook for enterprise” stole the show—even detracting from news about the specifics regarding Salesforce’s new Collaboration Cloud—as well as from other integrations and products announced at the convention. Now that the Chatter groundswell has subsided, we’d like to take some time to discuss the Collaboration Cloud, and a few of the more interesting product releases that were announced.

Some More Notes on Chatter:
During his keynote speech on the second day of Dreamforce, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff alluded to a fourth cloud (in addition to Service Cloud 2, Sales Cloud 2, and Custom Cloud 2), and as many speculated, Chatter is that fourth cloud. Given the subhead “Collaboration Cloud,” Chatter does very much resemble a “Facebook for enterprise,” but it is intended to be a “collaboration relationship management” tool.

Benioff clarified some of Chatter misconceptions about a week ago at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp, and also explained at a press conference last week that it’s a medium for data entry. Benioff says the biggest reason they lose customers is because customers “don’t put data in”—Chatter is expected to help them realize the wealth of data available. Salesforce executives prefer to think of it as a platform marrying the real-time benefits of social networking with CRM. This is a fair assessment, but from the looks of Chatter (which does look a lot like Facebook), it’s not hard to see how some trumpeted its social networking qualities above its collaboration attributes.

New Releases Announced at Dreamforce:
One of the cloud-computing announcements that slipped under the radar was that of the new Marketing Cloud community. The goal is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing operations—from marketing automation to analytics—through invitation-only discussions of strategies and best practices. Though the Marketing Cloud doesn’t involve a specific product release, it’s an exciting venture because of the big names in marketing software that support it, like Marketo, Jigsaw, Hoovers, and PivotLink.

Aprimo, a marketing software vendor revealed the on-demand version of their marketing management software, Aprimo Marketing Studio. Dreamforce has developed a reputation as the end-all cloud-computing event, so it isn’t surprising to see a number of on-demand releases during this type of conference. Aprimo’s VP Marketing stated that the shift of consumer media consumption from analog to digital was undeniable, and this SaaS offering will surely provide an easy and cost-effective way of expanding their product.

Another noteworthy announcement was Xobni’s Salesforce CRM extension: a Microsoft Outlook search and relationship plug-in that allows users to view Salesforce CRM data directly in their Outlook inbox. Xobni (the name is “inbox” backwards) is a San Francisco-based startup specializing in email organization solutions, and this new integration is estimated to save users 30 minutes per week.

With any luck the job market will be much improved within the next year, and Zoho has just released an application to help companies manage the recruitment process: Zoho Recruit. It’s an application tracking system (ATS) that helps staffing agencies and human resources departments track job openings, resumes, candidates, and contacts, and the streamlined process means recruiters can spend less time on administrative upkeep.

Zoho Recruit is a branch of their Zoho People’s recruitment technology, and touts ResumeGrabber, which sources candidates by pulling resumes from multiple web sources—social sites, email attachments, etc.—and even includes analytical technology that can weed candidates out. From there, recruiters can schedule interviews through the application, and also “lock” candidates who’ve already been decided on to avoid confusion.

Like other applications in the Zoho family, Recruit features drag-and-drop UI and is highly customizable to fit the users’ needs. For users working in staffing agencies, the application tracks and provides a platform for communicating with clients and contacts. And it will not only manage openings, but also serve as a platform for creating and publishing them.

Zoho Recruit has a free edition, and then the Standard edition—which allows for more job openings, mass mailings, and greater customization—is priced at $12 per user per month. Zoho has taken full advantage of their position as a web-based CRM platform by continually adding niche applications to the existing product, and it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with next. Below, a demo for Zoho Recruit.

Salesforce may have given some people a bit of a shock when Marc Benioff made the launch of Salesforce Chatter the subject of his keynote speech on Tuesday. Since that introduction, many have been calling it the “Facebook for enterprise.” Today, however, Benioff refuted that epithet at TechCrunch’s RealTime CrunchUp, and said that he prefers it be considered a collaboration tool.

During his speech, Benioff brought Chatter’s product lead, Steve Fisher, and the two gave some details. Benioff elaborated on his preference of “collaboration tool” over “social network” by calling Chatter, “a social extension to the Force.com platform.” As such an extension, developers will be able to tap into Chatter’s API to create social enterprise apps on the platform. And Benioff elaborated to say that Salesforce is “becoming a type of distribution network, not just an application provider, so any app can plug into us to provide content to Salesforce users. We can bring content to people via Chatter.”

In terms of the motives driving Chatter, Benioff made an interesting point when he stated that he has some 5,000 Facebook friends, many of whom are relative strangers, and about whom he knows more (through the network) than he does about some of his most valued employees. There can be no real downside to encouraging this kind of network among coworkers, but it still doesn’t explain how having a database for personal information results in collaborative projects.

But perhaps things that are unfamiliar only seem strange at first—TechCrunch’s Steve Gillmor congratulated Benioff on being “two years” ahead of the competition, and he’s probably right. Though impressed by Salesforce Chatter, many of us are scratching our heads as to how this is the biggest news to come from Dreamforce, but in two years, we probably will be wondering what we did without it.

The GURL creator

Information regarding Salesforce Chatter flooded this year’s Dreamforce 2009, but there were some interesting partnership products, among them Genius.com’s new social marketing automation tool.

Simply named, Social Marketing Automation leverages Salesforce.com’s Collaboration Cloud to nurture and score converted leads from social networking platforms. Genius prides itself on being one of the first to push “Sales 2.0,” or SaaS marketing automation tools, and for a while now their demand generation services have been popular on the Salesforce AppExchange. The new tool allows joint users of Genius.com and Salesforce.com to embed trackable links in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, and other social media to monitor leads and engage in live sales dialog.

The trackable links used for monitoring are the Genius URL shorteners (GURLS), which the company released earlier this past July as a tool for measuring the ROI of conversations happening in social media. Upon the official launch of the GURLs, Genius.com CEO and co-founder David Thompson took to the company’s blog, and state that they are a step toward structural overhaul within marketing automation, and an instrument for measuring the “cloudy” conversations, and then turning those conversations into deals. Furthermore, the GURLs allow for tracking conversations as they would any other campaign, but without inhibiting the stream in any way.

It’s a great concept, and a use of social media that goes beyond “interesting” and actually seems useful.

This week, SugarCRM announced its CRM products would be the latest applications to join the Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud, thereby offering customers and resellers the benefit of real-time scalability, accessibility, and on-demand foundation.

SugarCRM’s recently ppointed CEO Larry Augustin is quoted in the press release saying that Windows Azure goes “well beyond the simple hosted infrastructure that most service providers offer today,” and noted that the new service is key to the Sugar Open Cloud, facilitating the deployment of Sugar products to any location.

The process behind making SugarCRM applications available on the cloud only took a few weeks—this speedy turnaround time is attributed to the strong native support Windows Azure delivers for PHP, which is the programming language in which Sugar is written.

There have recently been warnings from Azure competitors and others that releasing Windows Azure developments could result in that customer being locked into the system. Still, the executives at SugarCRM seem not to be worried about this. One potential hazard that could arise, however, is that channel partners hosting SugarCRM on their own may see competition from the Azure cloud, but only time will tell.

Dreamforce was getting an impressive amount of attention even before the announcement of Salesforce Chatter, and a couple software companies launched campaigns to steal some of this interest. Microsoft set up a “truth squad,” for the San Francisco event, and SugarCRM took it a step further, distributing 1,000 pamphlets titled “Behind the Smoke Screen” at the Moscone Center.

The “book” is a sort of parody of Marc Benioff’s memoir, Behind the Cloud, published earlier this year, and accuses Salesforce.com of selling the same technology for the past decade. It even includes some (fake) blurbs from the likes of Kim John Il and PT Barnum. The pamphlet itself is very short and can be seen here, but in a guest entry on the destinationCRM blog, Denis Pombriant shared with readers an email he received from a Sugar PR rep regarding “Behind the Smoke Screen.” The email included excerpts from Benioff’s book that SugarCRM felt were “zingers” made at their expense, in which Benioff calls Sugar’s mock protest at Dreamforce 2006 poorly executed, and Sugar’s attempt to get PR from Salesforce.

The person sending the email makes a swipe at Benioff, calling him “the industry’s most down-to-earth CEO,” and says that to celebrate the release of their “book,” SugarCRM is offering free data migration for Salesforce.com users through the end of the year. In addition, registrants will be entered to win a Moto Droid. By the time Mr. Pombriant made his blog post, he said a PR rep of Sugar’s had confirmed that a Salesforce CRM customer had made the switch.

In Mr. Pombriant’s comments on the email, he says that if companies want to stop Salesforce they need to make better products, and also states that perhaps it’s his “New England roots showing,” but he doesn’t think this sort of email helps Sugar rise above Salesforce. I can say as someone not from New England that it isn’t Mr. Pombriant’s roots giving him that feeling—this is a petty jab at Salesforce, and these kinds of cheap tactics suggest desperation more than anything else, and give credence to Benioff’s suggestion that Sugar seeks PR opportunities from Salesforce.  Most companies are guilty of these guerilla campaigns, but in the end, you have to remember that the product is what’s most important.

Update: a lot of people are considering this campaign a success, and there are copies of the pamphlet being auctioned on Ebay.

Needless to say, Dreamforce made a big splash this year with the announcement of Salesforce Chatter, to be launched next year. But how is Dreamforce shaping up in comparison to Oracle’s OpenWorld?

For one thing, attendance at Dreamforce pales in comparison to that of last month’s OpenWorld conference—there are about 19,000 at Dreamforce, while OpenWorld drew almost 20,000 more attendants. Oracle Corporation is much bigger than Salesforce.com, so that could provide some explanation for the disparate attendance records. It is perhaps a little surprising the Dreamforce doesn’t have at least a commensurate attendance record, since cloud-computing has been a hot button topic this year, and Salesforce is pretty much the go-to source for cloud computing trends.

In terms of announcements, the declaration of Salesforce Chatter, which is being described as “Facebook for enterprise,” trumps Oracle’s announcement of Fusion Apps.  Oracle also announced a commitment to incorporating social networking into their CRM platform, but they didn’t present an offering that caused a stir the way Salesforce Chatter did—and it did cause quite a stir, cracking Twitter’s top ten with “#df09” as a trending topic. There is also speculation that Chatter is the new Salesforce cloud—Benioff alluded to four clouds in his keynote, naming Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, and Custom Cloud 2, and leaving the fourth a mystery (to be revealed tomorrow).

Some attendants of both conferences lamented the long-winded keynote speech, even though most have been enthusiastic about the announcement of Chatter. And Sam Diaz at ZDNet noted that Dreamforce didn’t offer the same caliber of celebrities as OpenWorld: San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom joined Benioff during his keynote, while Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Who’s Roger Daltrey attended OpenWorld. Diaz also noted a sense of “showboating overkill” in the speaker introductions.

We won’t be able to really assess the overall success of the conference until the end of the week, but is one of these companies doing “the convention” better?

Enterprise is getting it’s own Facebook! Salesforce.com kicked off their annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, and CEO Marc Benioff made the major announcement during his keynote speech: their new private social network, Salesforce Chatter.

Benioff has been advocating the use of real-time data for some time now, so it comes as no surprise that Salesforce would incorporate the social networking trend. Chatter is very much like Facebook, but it’s still an ambitious undertaking. People, applications, and content can have profiles, and there are also status updates that can be used to start conversations. The platform can be used to develop social enterprise applications, and all the 135,000 native Force.com applications will be able to tap into Chatter as well. No social media application within CRM seems complete without Twitter, and of course Chatter will incorporate the micro-blogging service, filtering the relevant Twitter feeds into the real-time data stream.

Native applications built on the Force.com platform can stream updates to Salesforce Chatter’s feed. Chatter is expected to be available next year, and will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com, and sold separately for $50 per user per month. It will be available for mobile devices as well, and will support iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile devices. It’s a wonderful idea, and definitely takes attention away from Microsoft’s announcement that they would be integrating LinkedIn information to Outlook. Below, there is a bonus photo of the platform’s (slightly scary) mascot, Chatty.

Last week, Oracle announced the release of PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9.1, which they developed after customer feedback indicated businesses were most interested in solutions that could accelerate business performance with a lower cost of ownership. Because no system update is complete without a social media facelift, CRM 9.1 was redesigned to tout a Web 2.0 user interface and experience, with new collaboration tools like wikis, forums and chats, and blogs and tagging. In addition, CRM 9.1 features drag-and-drop interactivity, search windows, and simpler navigation.

PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 is built on Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 technology platform, which is a development environment that offers flexibility in managing and integrating applications. Oracle cites the “lower cost of ownership” as being manifested in PeopleSoft’s compatibility with previous application releases—and therefore not requiring upgrades in core CRM applications—but this is a tad misleading because it doesn’t necessarily benefit those who aren’t already Oracle customers. For sales and marketing deployments, CRM 9.1 does provide more precise application configurations, which cuts some of the cost of customization.

Specific to sales and marketing customers, CRM 9.1 aims to lower cost marketing channels and expand reach with SMS messaging and an all-inclusive event manager. There will also be mass sales activity reassignment capabilities for sales managers. Still, PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9.1 can be tailored for many different verticals, from higher education to the communications market.

Plenty of recent studies indicate that more and more large enterprises are going to move to SaaS CRM and productivity solutions, and last week, PDI, Inc. was added to that list of companies making the leap. PDI provides sales and marketing support to US pharmaceutical companies, and will implement Veeva’s VBioPharma CRM Primary Care and Special Care editions, VMobile, and VInsights, before the end of this year. All of those products are part of Veeva CRM’s suite of multi-tenant SaaS applications, helping customers deploy various sales teams nationwide, at different intervals and sizes, and for different needs.

PDI’s senior vice president of IT, Jo Ann Saitta, stated that the move to the Veeva CRM offering was largely influenced by the flexibility of their SaaS solution: “Veeva allows us to provide life sciences companies with tailored solutions without delay.” Changes to PDI’s SFA system can be made quickly, and cuts costs by providing what Saitta dubs a “hardware agnostic environment.”

Saitta said that Veeva’s solution allows SFA to be less about computer systems, and more about enabling sales force to be efficient. It is worth mentioning that PDI had been using a SaaS CRM system for several years prior to selecting the Veeva suite. It seems that we are quickly entering the age in which CRM selections won’t be made simply based on whether the solutions are on-demand or on-premise, but based on the true quality of the product.