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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.

Cisco Systems has made a number of acquisitions in the past two months, and now they’ll be working on a new product for next year: an integration connecting their on-demand contact center telephony with Salesforce.com’s contact center software. Set for release in the first quarter of 2010, this new offering will be called the Customer Interaction Cloud, and will target small and medium-sized businesses.

This is not the first time Cisco and Salesforce.com have teamed up—their first integration was the Cisco Unified CallConnector for Salesforce.com. The application was available on Force.com, and integrated Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager with Salesforce. The Customer Interaction Cloud will integrate Cisco’s Unified Communications with Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2—this new product is entirely cloud-based, so in many ways it’s a modern version of the prior integration. As an on-demand product, it will eliminate any concerns over hardware, and allow users to focus on delivering customer service.

Customer Interaction Cloud is aimed at businesses with 30 to 300 support representatives, but it may also appeal to larger enterprises that opening new branches, or are in need of quickly deployable support systems.

Monday, Salesforce.com announced a new deal that will both improve Force.com’s CRM services and help the cloud application to branch out from its CRM mold: they signed a deal with Adobe to link Adobe Flash to Force.com. Analyst James Governor calls the alliance a means of pushing Force.com into its “2.0” phase by providing “rich internet application development experience.”

The Adobe Flash Builder will be the new provision for unified development, and will facilitate deployment of Flash applications on Force.com. Because this is an innovation to the Force.com platform, the overarching intention is that the builder be used to extend Salesforce.com CRM applications, but it can also be helpful for creating web sites, and desktop apps that can run outside the browser.

During its three-year tenure, Force.com has garnered some 63,000 customers, who’ve built 120,000 applications. With its Salesforce branding, Force.com attracts plenty of users looking mainly for CRM solutions, but also a fair number looking for non-enterprise solutions. A research analyst at Gartner noted that more and more companies look to Force.com to develop non-CRM applications. This partnership with Adobe Flash certainly gives an added accessibility to building CRM applications, and will thus be an undoubted success.

Last week, iLinc for Salesforce was named the “App of the Week” on the Force.com AppExchange. Every week, SaaS applications that integrate with Salesforce.com’s CRM platform are presented, and iLinc’s offering was featured for its ability to integrate webinar data with existing Salesforce CRM data, which in turn allows users visibility to effectively sell and communicate with potential customers, and reinforce loyalty with existing customers. Another factor in selection was that the iLinc app provides virtual meetings directly from Salesforce Lead and Contact records.

iLinc’s President and CEO, James Powers, stated that his company’s development strategy centers on working out tangible business problems, so an integration with Salesforce—establishing a real-time connection with CRM—was an obvious solution. The motive behind this particular integration is to get businesses to move webinars and online training sessions to the iLinc platform, and easily and effectively follow up with attendees using Salesforce CRM.

Reviews of iLinc for Salesforce have been positive so far, and as iLinc is a Gold Sponsor of this year’s Dreamforce (Salesforce.com’s annual user conference), attendees will learn more about the product during the November convention.

Last week, Salesforce.com announced it will partner with Cisco to deliver “the new face of customer service” by building a new contact center in the cloud. Combining Salesforce’s Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Communications, the new solution uses gives SMBs the ability to run customer service entirely in the cloud. Both Cisco and Salesforce share a faith in cloud computing, and both encourage leveraging social networking sites for customer service.

Service Cloud 2 and Cisco’s Unified Contact Center—which helps companies smoothly integrate inbound and outbound voice call with Internet applications—are integrated by a connector, allowing customers to use Salesforce CRM as their primary agent desktop while having access to Contact Center’s capabilities. The solution is for companies with 30 to 300 customer service representatives, and features the Customer Interaction Cloud, a tool providing more efficient communications.

Salesforce and Cisco consider this new integration the answer to growing demands for cloud-based customer service solutions within the SMB market, as well as a new model for customer service. The cloud model allows companies to deliver “the expertise of the community” to their customers, and Salesforce reports that some 8,000 customers have already turned to Service Cloud 2 (launched earlier this fall) for their customer service needs.

In a move reminiscent of Salesforce.com’s initial marketing campaign, hosting service Rackspace launched NoMoreServers.com, a site dedicated to Computing-as-a-Service models. In 1999, Salesforce.com commenced with the “No Software” slogan that promoted Marc Benioff’s cloud-based CRM offering, and today NoMoreServers.com embraces the rise of the All Cloud Enterprise (ACE).

The site considers itself a rally cry of “the new computing era,” positioned at the center of this shift within business IT. They encourage enterprises to empower themselves by learning, keeping current, and debating the trend. NoMoreServers will be edited by hosting expert and recent Rackspace addition Andy Schroepfer, and will feature articles and daily commentary about hosting, cloud computing, and key vendors like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, as well as a forum for discussions.

Rackspace is based in San Antonio, Tex., and provides hosting for about 70,000 businesses, and more than 51,000 of those are cloud computing businesses. And they are pretty intent on propelling enterprise into modernity, recently partnering with blogger Robert Scoble to launch Building 43, which encourages businesses to use modern technology and social media for increased productivity.

Salesforce.com and Dell have been longtime partners, and earlier this week they announced they are teaming up to target SMBs. They will offer joint, certified cloud-computing CRM bundles that will be priced as low as $9 per user per month (the cost of Salesforce’s Contact Manager Edition).

Salesforce and Dell have been testing the solution within their respective companies: Salesforce runs its datacenters and PCs on Dell equipment, and Dell has integrated Salesforce CRM with their on-premise applications using Dell’s PowerEdge servers and Integration Services. For Salesforce, this collaboration with Dell is a means of extending the adoption of cloud computing services, as it gives smaller businesses the obvious cloud-computing benefit of managing customer relations without the cost of managing infrastructure while utilizing pre-existing hardware.

Businesses with multipart IT systems will benefit from Dell Integration Services, which provides inexpensive and fast integration and migration for businesses using Salesforce’s cloud. Dell will more or less be reselling the stable of Salesforce.com products—from the Contact Manager to the Enterprise Edition—and offering the integration services.

Call center software provider inContact announced this week it would be releasing an integration to cloud-based CRM. An undisclosed provider of performance solutions for the casualty claims industry will be using inContact’s product with Salesforce.com for several call centers that deal with about 200 insurance agencies total. Over the past couple of years, the solutions company used Salesforce.com for CRM and inContact for call center operations, and by integrating the former product into the latter, the company will expand the Salesforce presence throughout their business.

Aside from eliminating the hassle of switching between the two platforms, the integration will merge routing, call resolution, and reporting, thereby improving the general call-center cycle. Agents and managers will use the same UI to answer calls and create reports.

Being that both inContact and Salesforce are cloud-based platforms, the integration will provide the typical benefits of a SaaS model—fast deployments, measurable ROI, and a lower cost. The economy has recently made SaaS solutions of all breeds popular, so this is surely not the last cloud-based call center integration we’ll be seeing. Another coup for inContact this week: a report by DMG Consulting showed their on-demand solutions were the most implemented hosted contact center products of 2008.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) recently released their annual e-business report, and Google came out the preferred Internet Portal and Search Engine, scoring a telling 9 points ahead of the next runner up. The quality of Google’s search results isn’t the sole factor in its popularity—their web presence is near inescapable given the number of applications bearing its name. With the proliferation of Google Apps, it is worthwhile to consider the effects on CRM systems, and to what extent the two are competitors.

With Google’s cloud computing capabilities and impressive number of applications—including the “holy trinity” (spreadsheets, documents, and calendar)—it is often the preferred method of managing customer relations for small businesses. It cuts down on overhead costs, and smaller businesses are not as easily deterred as larger ones by the security issues of the Google cloud and the occasional outages.

In some cases Google may not appear to be a major CRM competitor, but many CRM platforms have added Google integrations, both at the small-business and conglomerate levels. Salesforce.com has been integrating with Google since 2003, and in 2008 announced Salesforce CRM for Google Apps. The scalability granted by the cloud makes this platform to accessible by businesses of all sizes, though the aforementioned security and outage issues prevent many large businesses to relying on Google Apps for their CRM needs.

Zoho recently launched a sign-in integration with Google, and taken with Salesforce’s own integration, it is obvious CRM providers acknowledge the power of Google Apps even if they don’t fear it. These integrations are certainly smart, and some providers are taking their recognition further and adding in-cloud platforms—Salesforce has Service Cloud, and Microsoft announced Azure almost a year ago—to cover all bases.

It’s tough to say whether Google Applications will act as a serious competitor to large-business CRM systems, given that its current shortcomings would most likely not be easily fixed without changing the attractive price point. With some segments Google Apps it presents a challenge, but otherwise it is a tool for circulation.

As the social networking craze continues to attract a larger user base, businesses are beginning to catch on. Salesforce.com recently announced a new CRM application tailored for Twitter, an increasingly popular micro-blogging social network site.

 Salesforce’s new application should help facilitate customer service by providing another resource for customers with problems to turn to in order to solve any existing problems with their software or service. By providing companies with real-time updates on any “tweets” associated with their product or company, customer service or help desk agents can provide instant support to quickly remedy any situation that comes up.

The emergence of Twitter as a popular destination for customer support could lead many companies to follow in the footsteps of companies such as Comcast and Dell who have already chosen to adopt Salesforce’s new Twitter CRM application. Other CRM providers could also follow suit in developing their own CRM applications with features similar to Salesforce’s new Twitter application.

This could also become a golden opportunity for Twitter. If traffic to their site continues to grow and customers continue to use Twitter as a resource for their issues, Twitter could eventually build up their own application to sell to companies.

As social networking continues to grow and develop, companies will need to stay in tune with the latest trends in order to provide the best customer service and customer support in today’s rapidly changing society. Staying up to date with the latest trends and resources utilized by their customers could provide companies with an edge on their competitors while falling behind in these trends could lead to a disconnect between the company and its customers, forcing customers to eventually find other companies or solutions.

Although social networking is the current “hot” item in technology, things could change rather quickly. However, it would still be wise for CRM companies to take the popularity of social networking into consideration as they develop their new products. Failure to meet consumer needs could lead to disastrous consequences for companies.