SalesForce Chatter

Sales Force, Inc. made a big push last week introducing "Chatter", indicating that Enterprise Social Networking is suddenly something for all businesses to pay attention to. In the old days, chatter meant 'to talk rapidly in a foolish or purposeless way', so from a marketing perspective this is an interesting choice for a platform name. In my apparently dated way of thinking, 'chatter' was and is not something encouraged by most corporations. SalesForce's use of this label does not help make the argument that Enterprise Social Networking provides value to the organization. It only makes one wonder if the name was overly influenced by Twitter's success.

SalesForce openly admits they have yet to even deploy the software internally while their CEO Benioff said in an interview (captured in a BusinessWeek article) at the company's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco: "Collaboration is becoming a big part of how our customers will work". So what this looks like from the outside is a 'we don't use our own products for collaborating just yet, but we will have a really neat collaboration platform for you shortly' kind of announcement. Seems a little "me too", following John Chambers at Cisco. In any event, Benioff is now another voice openly recognizing the value of what we've helped our customers achieve from the moment Twiki, Inc. was formed two years ago.

If you want some very good insight into how to position your organization to benefit from this transition independent of the vendor platform discussion, it's definitely worth the time to read Andrew McAfee's "Enterprise 2.0".

From the start, Twiki, Inc. has run on the Twiki collaboration platform. Yes, we do use email and yes we also have a non-twiki based AP/AR system, but what might come as surprise to many is that we use a well integrated CRM and sales force automation tool built on Twiki that includes a Enterprise Social Networking feature called TWikiConnect (complete with Facebook like functionality but designed for corporate use). TwikiConnect has been deployed by our customers for over a year now, integrated with LDAP or Active Directory. And unlike SalesForce, we don't dictate to the customer regarding operating model being in the cloud or on their H/W behind the corporate firewall - we support whichever deployment approach is recommended by your IT organization.

Through this announcement SalesForce seems to recognize that their current Sales Force Automation product (very nicely implemented, despite being built on the old application development model with great reporting but lacking enterprise collaboration functionally), is really a hosted "Enterprise 1.0 application silo" and changing the existing SFA product to support true collaboration is not so easy.

Going back to traditional thinking again; Is it really news to anyone that in the agile Enterprise 2.0 model, the sales team also needs to collaborate with the rest of the organization?

Anyone want to have a 'chat' with us about collaboration or social networking in the age of the agile enterprise? Please give us a ring or post a Tweet to @Twiki.

I hope our marketing department doesn't suggest we introduce 'Twatter' as our SalesForce integration when we have one. Someone, please, help us with good name!

2009-11-23 | Will Thomas | Category Marketing