It’s actually not entirely out of the question and if it actually happens, I want this post to point to for posterity’s sake….

• Some good stories about what people are actually doing with Chatter, beyond the arm waving talk of user numbers
• More penetration of force.com for particular industry problems (Patel gives the example of FinancialForce and Chatterbox)
• SocialCRM integration (think intergation of external conversations with the salesforce tool)
• A deep dive into how the product really stacks up against the broader social software market

So what do I see coming out of DreamForce?

Chatter as a land and expand

When Chatter was first announced at DreamForce, it was met with significant commentary – half of that commentary was simply reiterating Benioff’s aspirational, kool-aide fuelled talk about the social revolution, Facebook for the enterprise and other such hyperbole. The other half were the more circumspect commentators who, while positive about salesforce’s moves in this area, questioned how broad uptake would really be and how applicable a CRM-centric social tool was to a whole-of-enterprise deployment. It didn’t help that, to a certain extent, Chatter was vaporware that didn’t really release until a significant time had passed post DreamForce.

Since then we’ve seen some interesting moves – salesforce has finally released Chatter to general availability and on a recent earnings call, Benioff let slip that salesforce would be releasing a stripped down Chatter that would be available for free. As he said on the call;

We are working on a free version of Chatter that will be a kind of virally-based product. And we will introduce that to our customers at Dreamforce. Some of our customers already have that product. And that is very exciting for us. We have been testing making Chatter more viral by giving our customers the ability to send viral invites

It seems to be that the initial strategy for Chatter relied on the assumption that it had such high inherent value that customers would flock to it. While Benioff has been keen to wax poetic about the significant uptake of Chatter (90k users at Dell and 60k of Salesforce’s 87k customers using it) my assessment is that user numbers and real uptake are two very different things. It’s been particularly telling for me to watch the Chatter application that all 30000 DreamForce attendees have access to. One would have thought that with such a large pool of potential users, all with free access to the application, that the channel would be running hot. However the reality is quite different – I’m seeing pretty limited use of Chatter by conference attendees and even some salesforce staffers are yet to even fill in their profile information let alone use the tool. Sameer hit the nail on the head when he wrote;

Having been around the block a few times with collaborative design and software initiatives with our customers , those numbers in and of themselves may not mean much. “Using” and “Registered Users” are very different things. I’m looking forward to seeing what exactly these customers are doing with Chatter, if they stick around or whether usage is bell curve-esq, and if/how its accelerating performance in a meaningful way (read: positively impacting operating and financial metrics). I realize that Chatter is relatively new and I’d be happy with even early indications of tangible value.

Salesforce has had its honeymoon period with Chatter, it now needs to show true value through the use of social – and judging by the dearth of activity in the DreamForce Chatter app, along with significant use of the #df10 hashtag on Twitter, salesforce needs to find a way to bring the outside in and leverage external conversations within an internal tool. Unless there is a compelling reason for using an internal-only tool, people tend to prefer something external.

I’d hoped to see much more progress on this since Benioff, along with Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur co-announced a Seesmic/Chatter integration three months ago. As yet we’ve not seen any real progress with this – I’m picking a dual pronged announcement base for Chatter at DreamForce;

• More detail on the free tool including the ability to really broaden its usage outside of the traditional CRM user pool
• A meaningful integration with Twitter (initially with Seesmic, but indicative of an externally focus)

[I've just been made aware of this pretty amazing integration built by ex-pat Kiwi Stephen Brown. Amazing what one developer can achieve that entire teams (from both the salesforce and seesmic camps) don't seem to have been able to...]

Pricing moves to broaden the franchise

Salesforce has had a great year, but it’s an ambitious organization that wants to be a multi billion dollar bigco. In order to do so it needs to move beyond it’s existing user base and broaden the size of customers it is suitable for. I’ve been hearing significantly more complaints about the inflexibility of salesforce pricing lately – just this week I was doing some consulting for a Government agency that was looking for a CRM system with a well developed ecosystem – salesforce and a number of appexchange tools would have fulfilled their needs perfectly but the inflexible pricing of salesforce was a deal breaker.

I’m not actually picking any announcements on this at DreamForce this year, but I suspect we’re going to be seeing a much more flexible approach towards pricing from salesforce over the next couple of years as it finds the easy wins in mid-size harder to come by and starts to look up, and down the foodchain for customer growth. I was talking with a salesforce reseller and force.com developer recently and they passed some comments over salesforce pricing;

[re difficulties with pricing] yeah so we find this with proposals to customers while salesforce is expensive you can generally sell someone who will be a core user of the system but the issue is those people on the peripheral who only need sometime access – the licensing doesn’t stack up for those sometime users

Customizations move down the foodchain

Another issue that many comment upon is the fact that only enterprise edition really gives users the ability to customize applications. Part of the value proposition that salesforce articulates is the ability to create highly customized workflows within the application – this proposition is weakened somewhat when only organizations on the highest prices licenses have access to this functionality. While the professional version does allow some additions (custom fields and layouts) there is no real ability to add custom logic or behavior. I’m picking some moves in terms of this to enable smaller organizations to look at salesforce as a viable option.

The (further) evolution of the ecosystem

Another approach towards building salesforce into a multi billion dollar company is to broaden the usage of the platform. We’ve already seen this by way of salesforce’s investment in FinancialForce – creating a discrete application that is standalone from salesforce automation. I’d expect to see lots of announcements about partner products, potentially some strategic investments by salesforce in other applications and a focus on empowering independent developers to create real products on top of force.com. The announcement this week of Zuora’s latest subscription and billing offering that offers AppExchange ISVs and Force.com developers, the ability to enable 1-click “Buy Now” capabilities right from within any app is an indication that salesforce, and it’s partners, are really focused on creating an AppStore for the enterprise on top of salesforce/force/AppExchange.

Summary

DreamForce is going to be huge – 30000 people, multiple sessions, big name keynotes and more dinner invitations than I can comprehend mean that next week will be a stressful, but exciting week. I’m looking forward to reporting further.

Over the past year I’ve been on something of a crusade to get NetSuite thinking about and acting upon social inside the enterprise. Every time I run into CEO and President Zach Nelson, my standard question is an enquiry into a response to Salesforce’s Chatter product. At the SuiteCloud APAC event today, Nelson announced that NetSuite has a product, built on top of the SuiteCloud platform, that will see social rolled out across the NetSuite application.

Slated for release in Q1 2011, SuiteSocial will, in Nelson’s words, take a similar approach to Chatter and allow “data points, not just people, to be social”. A translation of this is that, like with Chatter, SuiteSocial will allow users to subscribe to specific atrifacts within NetSuite – be they invoices, customer cards, inventory items etc. I later spoke with Craig Sullivan, VP & GM, International at NetSuite, who confirmed that the product exists in beta, but expressed surprise that Nelson admitted to the fact publicly – perhaps my incessant questioning gave him the desire to finally give me an answer I wanted to hear!

Why is this important?

Business is becoming ever more complex and noisy. Salesforce Chatter is heralded by CEO Marc Benioff as a revolution in bringing transparency and visibility of the information that is important to employees within an organization. NetSuite’s lack of a social offering was becoming more glaring, especially given that Chatter has now moved into general availability and is seeing reasonably good uptake (if the salesforce press releases are to be believed anyway).

Social really does make a difference to a business. Giving a salesperson, for example, visibility over a particular inventory item that is important to one of their customers, helps to bridge the gap between an organization, its suppliers and its customers. It could be argued that financial data, being the one data type that is common between all organizations, is even a better candidate for social than salesforce with it’s sales-centric data types. When discussion social this evening with Dennis Howlett, his comment was that the measure of  social product was if it proves to be meaningful for its users, a social product that is tied to the most central record of note, ERP, is as meaningful as it comes.

What else is NetSuite launching?

In other product news, and again as an answer to my criticisms of several months ago, NetSuite demoed their Google apps integration. This integration has a dual purpose, firstly it is a single sign on offering that allows authentication to occur between Google apps and NetSuite. more interestingly however it creates an opportunity for a deep and direct integration with the Google apps itself. In the demo we saw, a contextual gadget within a Gmail window allowed a manager to change invoicing information including date (via an integration with Google calendar) and also to approve invoices.

The integration, built by a third party NetSuite developer – allows employees to mold their software to the workflow that best suits them – a manager for example who spends most heir time in Gmail, should be able to action ERP-specific functions within their email client – Gmail contextual gadgets make that possible.

All in all these two announcements are pretty exciting. As Howlett points out, “Social is on everyone’s deck” – having said that thinking about social and actually doing it are two very different things. I’m looking forward to the release of SuiteSocial and seeing what partners will build on top of it.

Call be a skeptic but the entire routine just seemed too contrived for me. We all know Ellison is a major investor in a number of SaaS companies (Ellison was an early investor in both salesforce and NetSuite). Despite some back and forth about what constitutes a cloud, and Oracle’s focus on a hardware + software enabled private cloud offering, there relationship between these companies borders on the incestuous. So what’s going on here?

Lauren Carlson, an industry analyst at Software Advice, posts about the battle and points out that it’s closely following the previous battles that Oracle wages with Siebel – and what happened there? Oracle ended acquiring Siebel. So will this play out similarly in this case?

As Carlson points out, salesforce’s revenue from on-demand CRM is roughly two and a half times that which Oracle earns from a comparable category, salesforce therefore is no longer the plucky little upstart hat Ellison could foster, but rather a significant competitor that also has better product features in the hottest of areas (social CRM for example).

With all of this going on, Carlson has started a poll to assess whom people consider the market leader in CRM and, more from a crystal ball gazing perspective, whether people thing Oracle will acquire salesforce. It’s well worth filling in the survey, I’ll write about the results when they’re through

It’s a pretty good interview, even if Lacy lets Benioff get away with saying some pretty audacious things – things like "everyone has moved to the SaaS model". While I agree that in time most people will move to SaaS, it’s a little presumptuous to say that they already have. Benioff admits that the SFDC PaaS offering is fairly similar to the other PaaS offerings- interesting he didn’t try and talk up their own point of difference to claim superiority.

Interesting to hear of businesses using the Force PaaS service while not actually using SFDC’s original CRM offering – I wonder if there are some internal tensions within Salesforce between the traditional CRM staffers and the platform people.

Benioff sidesteps the obvious questions about his own plans viz a vis his shareholding in SFDC, he also talks openly about the number one enemy – Microsoft. He also pulls few punches when talking about SAP’s abysmal entry into SaaS.

It’s well worth a watch – check it out here.