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Lindsey Armstrong, Salesforce.com's EVP of international enterprise sales, sat down to chatter with Stuart Lauchlan at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisc, about the potential for the firm's new Chatter offering to break down the IM doors in financial services firms. 

SL: Recently, you've launched Salesforce Chatter. Who's the target audience for this? Is it an expansion play or are you pitching this to new customers?

LA : I think we're expecting the action to come from existing customers and enable us to reach out to the big enterprise licence deals. Chatter has the potential to make Salesforce.com sticky across the whole operations of a company. Our existing customers can see the vision for this. I actually had an email from one of our customer CIOs during the conference saying that he wanted this. It's rare to get that kind of reaction from a CIO upfront.

SL: So do you see this as a product that you will lead with when it comes to approaching new prospects? What's the pitch?

LA: When I first saw Chatter, I was really taken by it. I'm not particularly technical but it excited me. This has the capability to be the premier data aggregator in an organisations. I can see a lot of value for firms that have data sitting in different silos that are too expensive to get rid of. If you've spent $200 million on a Siebel system and it never delivered the value or the ROI it was supposed to, then this is way of squeezing the assets out of it. As a data aggregator on the front end, it has huge value.

SL: As head of international operations, do you have a feel for any particular geographies where you think this will be most well received.

LA: Japan. Facebook and Twitter just don't have the market share in Japan that they do in the UK or the US. We'll sell this over here by saying 'you're familiar with Facebook and Twitter'. But we cant do that in Japan because the opposite is the case. So there's an opportunity to make market as a Salesforce lead. Other than that, it will be UK and the strong markets first, such as Australia. Those are geographies where we have got the CRM base and which are aligned with a Facebook and Twitter culture.

SL: What about the security perception? Instant messaging has been ruled out of many organisations, most notably in the financial services sector, through fears about security. Won't this potentially suffer from the same issue?

LA: Actually I see it as the opposite of IM. I see this as IM with an audit trail. Let's face it, that's why people use IM – there is no security, no audit trail. You use it and you close it down. It's one way for some firms to get around Sarbanes Oxley. But this drags IM back into the security and audit trail domain. I strongly believe this is a way of systemising IM.

SL: With the recent commitment by various national governments to roll out G-Clouds for the delivery of key public services, how big an opportunity is the public sector to you going forwards? Isn't the sensitivity of putting sensitive data into the Cloud going to be difficult one for politicians to spin?

LA: Public sector is a lot of things. There's a lot of focus on tax data and where you store it, but there's an awful lot of other stuff that you can do before you get to attack the tax market. There's a lot of gain that can be achieved before you go into emotive areas like tax. We need to demonstrate the validity of the Cloud model and its benefits like we did in the private sector. There's no single industry that will benefit more from Cloud Computing than the public sector.

SL: A move to the Cloud in the public sector will change the fortunes of the big ticket consultancies which have done so well out of on premise roll outs. Are the days of CFOs having to write blank cheques tr t

LA: Consulting firms know that they have to change. The are facing the same question of how to make that change as any other company that has a large vested interest in the upfront model of computing. The difference is that they are far more willing to make that transition than any of those other vendors. They will make the transition because they are connected to the C-Suite. It's an inevitable path for them. I really believe it's not a choice for them. It's a choice that the customers want. A company like Accenture has had relationships with clients for 50 years that they are not going to burn for the sake of some piece of software. In some ways Cloud Computing is taking them back to their roots of doing process re-engineering and changing companies. A lot of them are very happy about that shift. But the business model has to change from one built around a small number of very large, complex and expensive projects to one built around a larger number of smaller projects.