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Since last November’s Dreamforce convention, talk regarding Salesforce.com has been largely about Salesforce Chatter, their enterprise social network and collaboration platform. But since the beginning of the New Year they’ve announced their Spring ’10 update, and more recently, the Force.com Visual Process Manager—these updates are naturally less flashy without the weight of a company conference, but they are no less significant for the CRM market.

Visual Process Manager's flow-chart like, drag-and drop interface

Salesforce’s acquisition of Informavores—a call scripting startup in the UK—is the origin of the Visual Process Manager technology. Force.com house the Visual Process Manager, which will help those using Salesforce’s Enterprise and Unlimited editions to create business applications with established set forms, questions, and decision trees. Visual Process Manager leverages a drag-and-drop interface to help users design their business processes. There are four components, one of which is a “wizard builder,” which creates step-by-step guides for end users. The other elements are a process designer, a simulation tool for testing, and a process execution engine.

This is a smart move on several fronts. For starters, it’s going to mean more developers on the Force.com platform. Not that Force.com’s user bass was dwindling, but the Visual Process Manager will certainly be an auspicious addition. There has also been a recent rise in the use and development SaaS Business Process Management (BPM) tools, and Salesforce’s clout in the cloud space implies the Visual Process Manager will be successful.

On another note, we’re curious to see what other acquisition-borne tools Salesforce.com puts forth this year—that is, how they’ll be spending the $500 million they recently raised.

Earlier this month, Salesforce.com announced the 31st generation release that will bring new features to Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, and Force.com: Spring ’10. Salesforce offers three releases a year, but this latest one will bring an entirely new user interface. There weren’t a large number of details given outside of the press release—we’ll have to wait till Spring ‘10’s February release to see more, but there is a screenshot of what the new UI will look like (below).

For Sales Cloud 2, the new changes aim to keep sales teams efficient and generate more leads. Notably, there will be real-time quotes given—sales users will be able to generate quotes using relevant data—which is generate automatically for quoting purposes. In addition, to accommodate salespersons offering multiple quotes throughout the sales cycle, Spring ’10 has “quote sync” capabilities to sync the final quote with the opportunity in one click.

Service Cloud 2—Salesforce’s platform for merging contact center technologies with cloud computing platforms—will be endowed with Salesforce Answers, and entitlements and service contracts functionality as part of the Spring ‘10 release. Salesforce Answers will help companies leverage cloud data for customer service, and more importantly, allow users to initiate conversations through unique customer communities. The other aforementioned improvement comes in the form of call center operators having access to some of that cloud data as well—they’ll be able to track service entitlements and contracts.

And users of Force.com, Salesforce’s ever-popular development platform, will finally see Adobe Flash Builder for Force (which Salesforce announced back in October), and will also have the ability to run authenticated sites. Adobe Flash Player on Force was jointly developed, and is an integration that’ll enable building cloud-based apps that can be easily deployed to end users through the browser using Adobe Flash Player. Spring ‘10’s authenticated sites feauter will allow companies to run public and private authenticated web sites from Force.com, and customers will easily be able to add security functionalities and create web sites for myriad purporses.

Again, we’ll have to wait and see how Spring ‘10 really performs, but things sound promising thus far. Salesforce.com can hardly make an update without their competitors matching it (or trying to), so we’re excited to see what else emerges this season.

If this past year was all about social networking in CRM, 2010 will most definitely be met with the rise of collaboration products in business suites. Salesforce Chatter, despite being dubbed the “Facebook for enterprise,” is positioning itself as a CRM collaboration tool. Not to be outdone by Salesforce.com, SugarCRM announced Cloud Connects and Social Feeds, which will provide collaboration capabilities for their users. Each of these new products offer collaboration abilities, but there’s a reason why they are being considered Facebook-like platforms—they offer the ability to create personal profiles, status updates, and the like.

SugarCRM and Salesforce.com offer CRM platforms for companies of all sizes, but it is very likely that those companies using their respective collaboration/social networking tools are medium-to-large enterprises. In the next year, we are probably going to see more CRM collaboration tools like HyperOffice’s Collaboration Suite, which caters to SMBs. Collaboration Suite is a SaaS platform, and allows users to create personal and group environments, and touts a UI that is very like that of Microsoft Office. Its features have been described as basic, but we have to keep in mind that it is a product for small businesses, and they rarely require the same level of sophistication that larger businesses need.

There will be an influx in CRM collaboration tools, and they are going to offer a range of sophistication levels. Not all services will offer Chatter-like features—specifically, the Facebook-like ones—and maybe this is a good thing. We always want to see greater innovation and complexity in each product iteration, in any technology segment; but when it comes to Web 2.0, sometimes the sought after innovations are just noise.

Personally, I’d like to see more collaboration tools that take the simple approach tibbr offers with its status updates. Not that Salesforce.com and SugarCRM’s products aren’t valuable for a number of business environments. They do offer a number of important collaboration abilities, but all that is currently shrouded in marketing that focuses on their social media aspects. It’d just be nice to see more CRM applications focusing on productivity, instead of the razzle dazzle of social networking.

Intuit Software announced last month that they’ll be expanding their reach in the small business CRM space, this time with Intuit Customer Manager. Intuit is best known for its accounting and finance software, like Quicken and Quickbooks, but this latest addition puts the company in direct competition with CRM chiefs like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

Naturally, many small business users aren’t working on streamlined management platforms, and rather are running their businesses across a series of products. Intuit’s accounting and finance offerings are already popular with many small businesses, so it isn’t surprising that Customer Manager is their next step in this space. Customer Manager gives users a simple way to see and update their customer data, and eschews the sophistication of large-scale CRM platforms. It provides a platform for contact information, pending tasks, appointments, and more. There’s a BlackBerry version, and Intuit execs say they will soon support other smartphones. Another smart move: businesses already using Quickbooks and Quicken can synchronize the data with Customer Manager, and also information from Microsoft Outlook.

Customer Manager is priced at $9.95 per month for up to five users, which is comparable to the pricing of similar products offered by other companies. Both Salesforce and SugarCRM released contact managers for small business users this year, and though both offer impressive CRM platforms, it’ll be interesting to see how Customer Manager fares considering there are already some 4 million QuickBooks users who can easily adopt the new platform.

SugarCRM released a broad upgrade today, and some of the features resemble those found in Salesforce.com’s newest offerings. SugarCRM 5.5 features a number of real-time functionalities, but their main achievements are a service called “Cloud Connects,” and Social Feeds.

Cloud Connects is a third-party web integration with LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and Hoovers, which touts social feeds with status updates, alerts, and notifications. Sugar’s Social Feeds is the dashboard that actually displays status updates and alerts; this information can be shared between users. Leveraging Cloud Connects and Social Feeds, users will also receive up-to-date account and lead information. People weighing in note that the combination of these services resembles Facebook, and therefore are compelled to draw similarities between the two and Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce’s real-time social network for enterprise. Salesforce.com announced the release of Chatter at their annual Dreamforce conference two weeks ago, and though CEO Marc Benioff insists that Chatter is a platform for collaboration, conference attendees christened it “Facebook for enterprise.”

Naturally, that Cloud Connect’s release is two weeks after Chatter’s precludes its being Sugar’s own version of Chatter. Still, considering SugarCRM staged a relatively successful guerrilla marketing campaign outside Dreamforce, it’s easy to see how many people drew that conclusion. You can see from screen shots of Cloud Connects, the program is more fragmented than Salesforce Chatter. Cloud Connects appears to be more of modular extension of Sugar’s existing CRM platform, while Salesforce Chatter looks, well, like Facebook.

Social Feeds

Cloud Connects' LinkedIn integration

There are a few other features in this upgrade, including a more streamlined Mobile Studio (Sugar’s mobile application) that allows for more editing and creating capabilities. There’s also Dynamic Teams, which improves collaboration on the CRM platform; and My Portal Dashlet, which allows users to view information from external sites and applications from the SugarCRM platform.

It will be interesting to see what other features Sugar adds to Cloud Connects in the future. They’ve been attacking Salesforce.com pretty aggressively, and I’d like to see if they make their social networking features more streamlined (like a “Facebook for enterprise”), or if they maintain the program as it is.

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.

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.

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?