Summary
Salesforce.com announced major initiatives with Computer Associates,Facebook and Twitter all around their new Chatter feature which Mark Benioff calls the greatest changes since Dreamforce.com began 8 yrs ago. But are these additions social fodder or new streams of revenue for the CRM giant?
Analysis
One day after disappointing numbers Salesforce.com's CEO Mark Benioff, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Anne Marie Frank from Avon, Dave Girourad of Google, Paul Daugherty of Accenture, John Swainson of Computer Associates stopped short of saying Salesforce.com is changing the way IT will run forever. In a sea of nearly 18,000 attendees, over 3/4 of those being from companies with more than 1000 employees, the new announcements have had mixed reactions.
With a steep run-rate and $1.3B in revenues Salesforce.com looks to increase market share with new announcements of social media interaction, Chatter for the force.com platform, Googles participation in the Salesforce.com cloud and revolutionary new ways to produce real time IT interaction and infrastructure. As Mr Swainson said, "there is a pre-cloud and post cloud.... this is not a change in technology, this is a change in the economics of IT" Computer Associates (CA) and Salesforce.com also announced their Agile Planning tool for IT management which provides all benefits of project management, ITIL, business process and systems management. BMC was also in the mix.
Along with Google and other social media participation it appears Benioff is building his allied forces against the axis of evil software giants Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. But are these announcements just social fodder or will they produce real streams of revenue for this CRM giant?
Service cloud, salesforce.com's attempt to provide real-time, more efficient service capability shows real promise with Chatter. With companies like Procter and Gamble being the guinea pig, results were impressive. Salesforce.com was able to quickly displace major players like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft and now has 55% of the service software market. Over 8000 customers are using their tools and giant Japan Post just signed on with over 100,000 users. Now with Chatter, included in Sales Cloud CRM but essentially requiring $50/month for Force.com license, user all aspects of real-time, social media, google searches and more will be available right in the service cloud. Companies are clamoring for way to take advantage of social media and this may be just the trick.
With the exception of CA's Agile Planner, Google, Facebook and Twitter's participation are all soft announcements of more distinguished guests at the party and will only add incremental enhancements to drive revenue. This leaves a bit of room for other players like Oracle, Microsoft, Sugar to make a few dents -though none of these is expected to be a threat to the salesforce.com gang Benioff has amassed. As they are proving, having the right people in the room, even with small contributions, makes for a good party.
