Chatting from Salesforce's Cloudforce event

Yesterday I attended salesforce.com's "Cloudforce" event for the official launch of "Chatter," the company's new social networking functionality for the enterprise.

Salesforce kicked off the event with this context: To reach 50 million users, radio took 38 years. TV took 13 years. The Internet took 4 years. Facebook did it in 5 months. "This is how the world is communicating," said salesforce.com. "Someday the business world will too. Welcome to Someday."

There's no doubt that the way people collaborate in most companies could use some improvement (full inbox, anyone?) Marc Benioff, salesforce.com's CEO, bashes collaboration tools that were "conceived of before Mark Zuckerberg was." His response to this is Chatter, which he describes as "Facebook for the enterprise."

The general collaboration concept behind Chatter isn't new. After all, collaboration has been offered through software as a service ("SaaS") for years -- solutions like Jive, Yammer, and CubeTree have seen solid adoption, particularly in small and medium businesses.

But salesforce.com has a much different approach than other solutions -- they're making Chatter a core part of their cloud platform. Chatter moves collaboration from the SaaS "layer" of the cloud to the platform as a service layer ("PaaS"). This has a couple of implications for the enterprise:

Chatter is a feed vs. its own destination. Traditional enterprise collaboration tools mean "yet another" place to go for information. This is a problem in an era where employees are already overloaded with information. A Chatter feed appears in the CRM application you're already using. Or if you're like me and live on your phone, salesforce.com announced today a mobile Chatter application for the iPhone (and an upcoming app for the Android).

Chatter can be used by other applications. Because Chatter is part of Salesforce's cloud platform, custom applications and packaged applications built on Force.com automatically inherit its functionality (here's an example). For developers, this is one of the core advantages of building applications on PaaS. Think about what it would take to add these social capabilities to an application you'd written from scratch. For customers, this means Chatter is more tightly integrated into the applications supporting your core business processes -- bringing together the structured and unstructured side of real-life information work.

It's not just people that Chatter. Unlike a consumer-oriented social feed, Chatter features a lot more than just personal status updates. With multiple applications contributing to the Chatter feed, everything in your business can be part of the same conversation. Opportunities can chat about their close date. Projects can chat about their milestones. Accounts can chat about their invoice payments. And your employees can join the conversation, providing critical context to these business events. And this entire feed can be consumed anywhere (more on "things chattering" here).

There are two types of cloud events -- those that focus on the "what" and those that focus on the "how." Last week's cloud leadership forum was all about the "how" of cloud computing, focusing on how enterprise IT can tackle issues such as security, reliability, and performance to get to the cloud. Today was all about the "what" -- the type of innovation that's possible for businesses who are already in the cloud.

Both are critical, but I have to say, the latter is a lot more fun!

Ryan Nichols is the Vice President of Cloudsourcing and Cloud Strategy for Appirio.