This past week I attended the Cloud Computing / SaaS event of the year known as Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual conference.
More than 19,000 registered for the conference — up from 10,000 a year ago — where they announced a new offering called Salesforce Chatter. This corporate collaboration service product is essentially Facebook and Twitter for enterprise users. My initial reaction was a sense of excitement. Salesforce needs to create new offerings in what it believes can be a billion dollar + market segment. However, as I cruised the expo floor and chatted with customers, I realized their sentiments were quite the opposite. Most customers had little desire to pay for this additional functionality when they already have some form of enterprise collaboration.
Even though there seems to be momentum in Cloud Computing and social networking in the enterprise, the reality is any expenditure that has more of a productivity ROI rather than hard-dollar ROI is tough for any business to make. People are still struggling out there and though Salesforce Chatter is innovative it’s still a tough sell. If you don’t believe me, just count the relatively few number of people who raised their hands when Marc Benioff asked how many people would adopt Chatter. I think this is a great move long-term for Salesforce but I’m skeptical about any immediate success.
