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Salesforce: chattering its way to social integration in the cloud
Steve Hodgkinson
Salesforce: chattering its way to social integration in the cloud
Salesforce.com announced the development of a social networking platform called Chatter at its Dreamforce conference last week. This is an interesting example of the rise of social computing as a factor in cloud integration - enterprise architects should pay attention.
Salesforce is a bellwether for the growing momentum of cloud computing
The Dreamforce event played to a packed house - a sign of the growing momentum of both Salesforce as a company and the cloud computing movement. Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive, was predictably upbeat about the numbers; 19,000 registrations for the San Francisco event, strong third-quarter financial and customer growth, and a projected annual revenue result of $1.3 billion. Benioff claimed that 70,000 organisations now use Salesforce solutions, ranging from small businesses through to global corporations - with more than 150 customers having over 1,000 subscribers.If Salesforce is a bellwether for the cloud computing revolution then momentum is surely building, and moving 'up market' into the enterprise arena.Cloud platform integration is morphing from a weakness to a strengthOne of the often cited reservations of enterprise CIOs regarding the cloud computing model is integration. 'SaaS is fine for point solutions - like Salesforce for CRM - but we need fully integrated solutions' is a comment that we often hear when discussing cloud computing with our enterprise clients.Salesforce has moved steadily away from its origins as a provider of point CRM-as-a-service solutions. The offering now includes three main platforms: Sales Cloud - to support customer and partner relationship management activities; Service Cloud - to support call centre and customer self-service activities; and Custom Cloud - the force.com application development and hosting platform, reportedly hosting 135,000+ applications.Integration across these cloud platforms is improving - and is starting to become a strength, rather than a weakness, of the Salesforce offering. Customer case studies published by Salesforce reveal a surprisingly compelling integration story. Many enterprises of significant size and global scale are deploying integrated cloud and on-premises applications to support core business processes. Chatter is about social integration as wellOne of the major announcements at Dreamworks was Chatter - a social computing collaboration platform. Chatter, launching in 2010, will offer what we now regard as the standard enterprise 2.0 functionality of profiles, status updates from people and activities, groups and feeds. Chatter will provide a social computing layer across the Sales, Service and Custom clouds and is planned to integrate with other market social computing platforms. Chatter joins at the back of the queue of other contenders seeking to bring social computing magic to the enterprise, such as Microsoft SharePoint, Lotus Connections, Open Text Social Media, Socialtext platform, Atlassian Confluence and many others. However, enterprises are starting to mature beyond pilots and false starts with 'stand alone' social computing platforms. Many are now thinking more deeply about how social computing integrates with core business applications and workflow to embed collaboration into their organisation fabric. Integration is only partly a technical challenge - as anybody that has tried to implement SOA is well aware. It is one thing to create a technical interface to flow data between systems but another thing altogether to create a flow of useful, relevant and timely information. Chatter will be a useful addition to the Salesforce platform because it will provide a means to stimulate collaborative information flows between the users at the enterprise's sales and service front line - where the reality of integration plays out on a minute-by-minute basis each day. Enterprise architects need to pay attentionAs the scope of functionality provided from the cloud increases, and as a critical mass of users forms around particular platforms, architecture commitments will emerge by default. We may see the demise of enterprise-specific architecture in favour of de facto cloud architecture.In a further illustration of Ovum's proliferative innovation in action, enterprise architects may have to start their deliberations by pondering the question 'which integrated cloud platform(s) have our users already adopted?' Integration architectures may be driven as much by the power of social computing platforms to stimulate information flows as by APIs and technical integration.
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