The web 2.0 revolution on the workplace

In a guest post on TechCrunch of feb 24 2010 Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce argues that enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.

"In this decade, I’ve become obsessed with a new simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” ( ) The compelling aspect of feeds, profiles, and groups, amplify the service’s stickiness. So does its functionality on a mobile device like an iphone—necessary to secure a service’s status as a “killer app.” Facebook is where I start my day to find out what my friends and family are doing. It’s where I go to see the important events in my social life. Everything I care about and need to know is pushed to me—and it requires no work on my part.


Now, we need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone’s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet."


Anticipating on this coming revolution Salesforce has developed Salesforce Chatter an application that presumably unites the best of Facebook and Twitter and applies it to enterprise collaboration - making people more productive and businesses more competitive.



Other companies like Yammer, SocialText, Jive, SocialCast, and others compete with similar applications, some running "in the cloud", others running on internal servers. No doubt one force not to be taken lightly will  come from Google that recently opened up an open source marketplace for Google Apps and Gmail integrated contextual apps extensions. See earlier post. These let developers integrate all sorts of enterprise data right into Apps and Gmail. Whilst a company like Salesforce has a few million users, Google already has 25 million Apps users and apparently this number is vastly growing. For companies like Salesforce this is potentially a huge marketplace that they should either embrace or compete with.

For whom it may concern: here's Google's elaborate "Campfire presentation" where they announce the marketplace. The presentation is divided in several different 10 minute video's including a number of business cases.