It's all about diversity of offering, reckons CEO Marc Benioff. “Our growth continues to diversify,' he argues. ““While our flagship Sales Cloud continues to drive the majority of new business, roughly 1/3 of new business in the first quarter came from Service and Platform Clouds.  We're positioned to create much higher levels of customer success with the coming additions of incredible new technology, including: Salesforce Chatter, our enterprise collaboration service; Salesforce Jigsaw, the leader in crowd sourced data services.”

 

The Chattering classes
 

Of these new pushes, it's probably fair to say that most is riding on Chatter and certainly Benioff gives the impression that of the new generation this is the child of which he is the proudest parent. “The response to Chatter has been nothing short of amazing,” he argues. “Few times in my career have I seen really the emergence of a real killer app. I certainly saw it with Oracle with the Oracle Database, I certainly saw it with SalesForce.com with our core SFA.  But now, I believe that I'm personally working on the largest and most important application in my career.”

 

Even by the rhetorical standards of the 'never knowingly undersold' Benioff, that seems like a pretty big claim to make. “No matter what market I bring it to, whether it's the United States, whether it's Europe or in Japan, the demonstrations that I make create an almost visceral reaction with a customer that they want the technology immediately,” he insists. 

 

“I've personally had quite a few situations now where I'm in with either a CIO or a CEO demonstrating Chatter to them, initially just telling them how their sales users are going to do better. There was a case where a company in Japan who have got about 20,000 employees. They've got a couple of thousand users on Salesforce.com for their sales force. When we were in with their CEO presenting to him and a few key members of his management team, he stood up and he said, 'I've been on Twitter, I've been using Twitter everyday to kind of get my message out to the market and [to find out] in effect, what the government is thinking about us and what our customers are thinking about us. This is like a private-enterprise Twitter, but it's integrated with my core data. I want this in the hands of every one of my employees'.  

 

“We have a lot of banks in Japan who use our product. There's one very large banking group that's quite decentralised, and they did something unusual. They brought all their CIOs in to meet with us - I don't think they have actually ever done that before as an organisation - and they just wanted to get an update on using the Sales technology. At the end of it, we thought we're just looking for more orders on sales force automation. They come up to me and say, 'Oh no, I want to be your first enterprise-wide on Chatter in Japan. And when exactly? I want it now.' And I love that. And we just need to figure out getting it to them.”

 

 

So when will that be? Not that far away actually – 22nd of June to be precise. “After starting with 100 customers, our beta programme quickly grew to 500. More than 1,000 customers are now using the beta version of Salesforce Chatter,” says Benioff.  “When we turn on Salesforce Chatter, all 77,000 customers just get it. It becomes the new user interface. And then built into the product in the next release is the ability to kind of just automatically spawn from any user's account another user on the network and bring them into their Chatter feed. 

 

“We think that the viral nature of that has just tremendous potential within the existing enterprise. And then we're looking at doing things outside of the enterprise, but this is kind of a more of a future thing. By the time we get to [the] Dreamforce [user conference in December], we hope to be able to kind of clearly articulate the future direction of the product, but also I think we'll be able to have customers onstage who have actually deployed it enterprise-wide.”

 

For now, the primary customer reference citation comes from eating his own dog food.  “My personal experience that it's completely transformed Salesforce.com,” claims Benioff. “Certainly, it's broken me out of my bubble as a CEO, I have visibility in my organisation that I never had. - deep into my sales information, deep into my customer service inquiries, deep into my products, deep into my competitors. 

 

“I'm outside of the CEO bubble. Every CEO gets trapped in it because only you have your direct reports. You get out and you make a few customer calls. You meet some employees. You're doing a lot of email, and that's your bubble, and I'm out of it. I think other CEOs see when we're doing the demo that it can do that for them and that's going to let someone like me make better decisions like the decision we've made to grow because we see the opportunities.”

 

 

But it's not all about Chatter. There's the Data Cloud to take into account as well. That particular push is coming out of the surprise acquisition of crowd sourcing firm Jigsaw earlier this year. Salesforce.com has made very few acquisitions to date, but Benioff argues that this one made both technological and fiscal sense. “Jigsaw's data services strengthen and differentiate our core business, enabling us to deliver a new level of CRM success,” he explains. “Put simply, better data turns killer apps into killer solutions. For existing customers, we believe Jigsaw will translate into higher levels of customer satisfaction, stickiness and much lower attrition.

 

“Jigsaw creates a new growth opportunity for Salesforce.com in the $3 billion business-to-business data services industry. By delivering a fully integrated application and data solution, much in the way that Apple has with iTunes and the iPod, we believe we'll be well positioned to capture a growing piece of this market.”

 

There's also a longer term vision here that taps back into the sentiments surrounding the Platform as a Service ecosystem ambitions for Force.com.  “By deeply integrating data into our core services, we're laying the foundation for a rich data ecosystem, one that will build the easily appear into our other applications like Chatter or the Sales Cloud or the Service Cloud,” says Benioff. “You can imagine changes to your contact information, a phone number, maybe a news story or a stock indication automatically appearing in the Chatter feed all through the Salesforce Jigsaw. We believe that this, too, will create new opportunities for customer and revenue growth in the future creating the concept of the Data Cloud.”

 

Finally (for now) there's VMforce, the result of a tie-up with VMware and a blatant 'come hither' to the millions of Java developers out there as well as enabling Salesforce.com to tackle the 'proprietary' baggage that comes with its own Apex development language. “With VMforce, more than 6 million enterprise Java developers globally, including 2 million using the Spring network, will have an open path to Cloud Computing,” says Benioff. 

 

”Force.com developers, who traditionally have been using the Apex technology, will have the opportunity to use Java. CIOs are going to love that the Force.com platform is trusted and open. By building Java apps on Force.com, developers will immediately benefit. Force.com's database is a service, which delivers proven reliability, scalability and flexibility in the most transparent and trusted enterprise Cloud today, where VMware strong Spring environment becomes a client to this service. Users are going to love the result in applications, which are going to be social, mobile and collaborative and easy-to-use.”

 

 

So it's an expanded portfolio for Salesforce.com, but with that increased range of offerings comes the inevitable question of what matters most to the company? Is there a favoured child in the family? When pressed, Benioff anoints the Service Cloud offering with that mantle. “Service Cloud has seen triple digit growth,”  he says. “It's a market that has not been refreshed by the traditional enterprise technology vendors. We view it very much as a green field opportunity. A lot of customers who are using products like Siebel 7.8 have to make a tremendous decision to upgrade to Siebel 8, which is a huge new mega piece of software and architecture customisation,  everything is new. So it's been giving us a great opportunity. We've seen some fantastic customers move to our Service Cloud, like Thomson Reuters.”

 

But all roads lead back to the current 'next best thing'. “I will tell you that Chatter makes the Service Cloud even better,” says Benioff. “In my own personal use of Chatter everyday, the way I have it architected, I am able to follow a customer case in the same way that I can follow an employee in the company. As the case changes,as things happen, as transactions happen with the case,  I'm all notified through my Chatter feed. That kind of real-time access to customer service information and that kind of visibility from Chatter into the Service Cloud makes the Service Cloud even better. So you're going to see a major new version of the Service Cloud released on 22nd June. “