Salesforce.com has officially launched Chatter, the "seminal" application that it claims heralds the launch of Cloud 2.0.
The offering, a cloud-based 'enterprise social collaboration' platform which is based on the Force.com development environment, includes traditional social media functionality such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds. It enables staff to work together on documents, obtain insight into organisational initiatives and projects, follow other employees and customers and access business information that is pushed to them.
Marc Benioff, the vendor’s chairman and chief executive, said: "Salesforce Chatter is the most exciting thing I’ve worked on in my career. Delivering Chatter is a seminal moment and one that marks the arrival of Cloud 2."
He added that Cloud 2 had started with the emergence of consumer-oriented social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but had now moved onto the enterprise, providing organisations with the same "immediacy and productivity" with added "trust, security and scalability" included.
In order to boost adoption, the supplier has also introduced a new Chatter-only enterprise-wide licence. The product is available now and will be provided on a free-of-charge basis to all existing CRM licence holders. Customers can also buy third party Chatter-based applications from the firm’s ChatterExchange, which was launched in April, some 60 of which are currently available.
The offering was released to 100 companies in private beta form in February this year, before being expanded to a group of 5,000. Salesforce claimed that 27% had seen an increase in staff collaboration as a result of adoption, while 22% had experienced productivity improvements.
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