Sazcast Episode 8 – Enterprise Tech Adoption & Salesforce.com Chatter

Interesting conversation, but I believe you guys missed the point a bit with regards to Chatter by SFDC. For starters, SFDC already has a tool to interact with and aggregate information from external social media tools like Facebook and Twitter - it's called their service cloud. They've had this running for a while now and it does exactly the things you described earlier about being able to see the social conversation taking place about your company, your customers, or one of your competitors. That wasn't the goal here.

Chatter was entirely aimed at moving SFDC from being just a CRM tool into a true enterprise-wide application. It took square aim at what SharePoint does today (or at least parts of what SharePoint does). This is a strategic move for SFDC to build deeper penetration within their existing client base. They obviously see that over the last two years SharePoint evolved from the document sharing system that you describe it as to one of the most innovative, scalable, extensible solutions in any enterprise. If you haven't taken a look at SharePoint 2007 in the last two years, I suggest you take a good long look. Within a year of its launch, SharePoint 2007 became the fastest growing product in Microsoft's history - and with good reason. Consider also that Microsoft is now the number one competitor of SalesForce.com with their Dynamics product (again, if you haven't seen Dymamics in the last 18 months you need to take another look). And one of the major differentiators between the two is that Dynamics can natively interact with both SharePoint and Outlook. SFDC is clearly trying to offer an alternative to SharePoint's collaborative and internal social network tools that runs in a cloud-based environment (which MSFT has not done a good job with so far for SharePoint).

One of the comments that was made is that Chatter is a non-starter because other tools already provide these services today. This is an interesting comment and I see where your coming from, but I don't entirely agree. For companies that have heavily adopted SharePoint 2007 for social profile and collaboration needs, I don't see them making the jump over to Chatter. There would be too much of a hassle to do this and no real substantial benefit. However, I believe you would be surprised at the low percentage of companies that have truly adopted social and collaborative tools within the enterprise. For those companies (especially those that already have SFDC), this has some substantial benefits. I would say this is especially true for companies that are not "Microsoft shops" or those that don't have (or don't want to allocate) the resources to manage the infrastructure that goes along with SharePoint. One of the major benefits of this solution as compared to SharePoint is that ability to instantly deploy and not have to allocate or train a single resource.

Like I said, I did enjoy the dialogue, I just feel like you sold Chatter short and didn't see its true intent. The release of Chatter has created an extensive dialogue on this topic within our company at the highest level.

Feel free to email if you want to continue the discussion.