This edition sports some familiar longtime Gangsters, including Ziff Davis Enterprise and ITBusinessEdge editor Mike Vizard and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, who promises not to agree to time limits on his next bets. Alert listeners of the old RSS-bound version of The Gang will recall Calacanis bet a sushi dinner that Google would launch its own OS. I pinned him down to one year, and unfortunately the bet was joined 3 or 4 years ago. Even if you accept the idea that ChromeOS is a real OS, then the next bet might be when Silverlight merges into the new Windows. Robert Scoble says no Silverlight Office for 5 years. I say 2 years tops.

More recent regular Kevin Marks continues to party down on the notion that HTML 5 will hit the mainstream shortly. Kevin sees Microsoft’s announced support for Silverlight video transcoded to Apple streaming format for the iPhone as a validation of HTML5, but there’s no getting around Microsoft’s aggressive use of Silverlight to push the market ahead of HMTL 5’s progress in the video area. Scoble says that’s not Silverlight on the iPhone, but if you combine the video hack with Miguel De Icaza’s Moonlight recompiling hack to iPhone primitives, it adds up to a porting path for Mac, PC, iPhone, and Android. Sounds like another sushi dinner for me. A feast of possibilities to ponder on a happy Thanksgiving Day.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

To win one, just tweet out your favorite moment of the RealTime CrunchUp so far, and include the hashtags #CrunchUp and #Cloud in your tweet (#CrunchUp is the conference hashtag, and #Cloud will let us know who’s entering the contest).

We’ll announce the winners in this post later today, and you’ll be able to pick up your signed book at the front table. Obviously you’ll have to be present to win.

Here are the winners:
Christianhobbs

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Salesforce.com co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff is sitting down with TechCrunch IT editor Steve Gillmor and TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld to discuss the socialization of the enterprise. Benioff recently unveiled his own social strategy for Salesforce: Chatter. Debuted at the company’s Dreamforce event, Chatter allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups within the platform, enabling them to be connected via a unified stream. In addition, developers will now be able to tap into Chatter’s API to build social enterprise apps off of platform. While Chatter looks and feels like a social network for the enterprise, Benioff is quick to nix that moniker, preferring to call the platform a collaboration tool.

Below find my notes (paraphrased):

ES: We’re here with Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, he’s had a few announcements the past couple days.

MB: We’ve had 19,000 people for our Dreamforce convention. We had a successful announcement for a new product called Chatter. It takes this thing Steve Gillmor calls real-time and combines it with the enterprise. It brings in the power of real enterprise computing. I’ve brought in Steve Fisher, Chatter’s product lead from Salesforce and I’d like to do a overview of Chatter.

—-video of Chatter—-

MB: Steve and I started a software company together, he taught computer science at Stanford and worked at Apple.

SF: The core idea behind Chatter is bringing real-time nature to enterprise, where its sorely needed. This provides the context for information in the stream. It not only delivers a social application but also a platform for people to innovate off of. Chatter takes a database object and turns it into a person and profile.

MB: Chatter is a social extension to the Force.com platform.

SF: Any applications built on Force.com now had feeds associated with it. When you are interested in an application, you can see the feed for information. An application can talk to a person, and people can comment on this.

MB: As key tasks and activities happen in applications, all are enabled with all features to access Chatter.

ES: Chatter will be the new homepage?

MB: yes, it will be integrated into the new homepage along with a dashboard of reports and approvals, workflow, tasks and calendar. You’ll also be able to see filters as well. Chatter will let you see updates from people, files, applications, HR, and will integrated other Feeds (Dow Jones, Thompson Reuters). A standard object, like a possible sale or opportunity, is alive. You can comment on that and also builds in relationships with other people on the deal.

Because it’s built on Force.com, security models are high-tech. The idea behind realtime enterprise is to leverage what we are learning from consumer world, ie what’s in Facebook and Twitter, and then take the data of what’s in the enterprise and make it relevant.

You can also group users, and those groups can have a profile or wall and set up Twitter feeds to track.

SG: A couple of years ago, I’d get strange Facebook messages late night from you. You really use this stuff. Somehow you’ve taken something that you are fascinated with and translated it into a product.

MB: I have 5,000 friends on Facebook. But why do I know more about these strangers than I do my own employees. I am smarter about people I don’t know about than people who are my most important employees.

Robert Scoble: On that point, Salesforce is only used by a small # of people inside corporations. Why aren’t you ripping this out and make this more low cost?

MB: We are. All Salesforce users can use thus for free. We also have a low cost separate product. And we will be rolling out a free version. We are working on figuring out what that is.

ES: What is that going to called, Chatter Lite? This is a new type of Stream?

MB: This is a deep integration of the fundamental transactions. We are exposing fundamental audit trails. And we provide linkage between content and apps and the people; it adds contextual information for users. It’s adding metadeta.

ES: Enterprise social networks have always been about getting real-time social data to users.

MB: I feel that I’m a slave to email, to Outlook. But my content management system is its own island of data. Twitter and Facebook has shown that we can provide more context and meaning to this information. Because there is an API that you can plug into, if you are a data provider, you can plug into this. I love software and I love technology. Chatter gives you metadeta and integrated data. Salesforce is becoming a type of distribution network, not just an application provider, so any app can plug into us to provide content to Salesforce users. We can bring content to people via Chatter.

MB: We’re not that far into it. We’re looking for feedback. We have a general strategy. We think this a unique strategy. We need some new things besides Mircosoft Sharepoint. This is our fourth cloud.

ES: Do you think there’s going to more User interaction with this application?

MB: We are looking to the consumer world to the things that have been popularized like feeds, profiles and then adds computer technology, to create this for the enterprise. We’re trying to implement real-time on our platform. We’re passionate about SaaS, but collaboration is the next thing. And why should this only be on the consumer side. Why can’t a follow my PowerPoint presentation.

—-Q&A—-

Alex Williams: What about moving contact information in Facebook and connecting this to Chatter?

MB: You can integrate it as a feed. We are a metadata driven server.

MB: I’m not bashing Microsoft, I’m just explaining why its a monopoly. I paid to upgrade to Windows 7 and I got no new features. It’s insane that we tolerate this.

Question: Do you want to buy Zoho?

MB: there are so many companies out there, we have 4000 employees there are lots of conversations. We’ve only looked to buy a few companies over the last ten years. I’m not that familiar with Zoho. It’s very hard for us to bring a company in. Our architecture is very sophisticated. I’m not saying that we aren’t going to make acquisitions.

ES: the fact that you have so many APIs means that you don’t have to make acquisitions?

MB: We’ve completely integrated with Google Apps, Gmail, and more. When you update your Google spreadsheet, it will show up in your feed. We need to have deep relationships with Google, and other companies.

SG: Congratulations! You are two years ahead of your competition.

MB: Chatter is deeply integrated into our core. We have completely reworked our architecture to become more real-time. I want to thank Steve Gillmor for this.

Video: Recording can be seen here.

Transcript: Provided by PLYmedia.

> We have a world famous author here.

>> He’s a world famous author.

Marc Benioff.

Everybody has his book.

>> We’re going to get started.

So Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.Com.

You might have heard he’s had a few announcements the past few days.

You had a little event, what, the past few days, right around the corner, right, a small affair?

>> Next half an hour, because alter your reality, often, but we’ve had 100 people, over the

Last three days for our

people from all over

it’s a long way to go, I understand.

But it was very successful announcement of major new product and chatter, basically takes this

Thing, this thing that Steve calls real time.

I’m still trying to understand what it is.

>> We call it real time.

>> We.

>> This real time idea, combines it with social and interpresent and really takes and you’re

Going to see it for the first time here, this very idea that we’ve seen popularized and the

Users use in Facebook and Twitter but brings in the power of real enterprise computing.

Because I have hot tea because my voice I woke up with no voice and it’s slowly coming back.

But I brought with me my head of engineering.

Who is responsible for all development QA and tests.

And who is responsible for overseeing the chatter development and also Dan Darcy who is one

Of our keytologists and what I’d like to do is I’d like to show you a quick three minute overview

With you, if this is okay.

Is I’d like to show you a quick three-minute overview of the video.

And then what I want to do is I want to

I want to have Steve do a technical overview of

How we did it, what it is, and so forth for about maybe five or ten minutes, and then that’s

Going to include a live demonstration under the development server.

And then we’ll take 20 to 15 minutes and we’ll do the questions.

>> You’ll be out of time.

>> Let’s jump into it.

>> Terrific.

This is chatter.

>> Let’s roll the video.

The problem with business collaboration today is that you have to go to one place to create

And manage content.

Another place to use your business APs and finally somewhere else for e-mail and instant mess

Enger, just to collaborate with the people using all these different technologies.

What if you could join all these separate activities in one place.

Salesforce chatter combines the latest collaboration trends in social computing with robust

Sharing and security controls of enterprise cloud computing to deliver break through levels

Of creativity and let’s take a look this is the chatter application home page.

Right away we can see how chatter brings your business applications to life.

At the top, you see your own picture and your latest stat usesup date.

When you click on your picture you’re brought to your own work profile.

Here you can upload your picture and write a quick blurb about your expertise.

Now you and everyone in your company can easily learn about each other’s talents and how you

Can help each other get things done.

In the middle of the page is where you post your status.

Just like you would in your favorite social networking sites.

This is where you let everyone know what you’re working on, whether you’re at a conference

Looking for new business or asking anyone in your company for advice.

Chatter keeps you connected to your colleagues by letting you follow their activities.

And provides a private social network for your company where you can share information secure

Ly and discover new insights.

Chatter lets you do a lot more than follow your colleagues.

Here on the home page is your main feed of real time updates you can see people responding

To your status.

But you can also keep track of everything that’s happening in your applications, including

All the data, and the content you care about most.

You can see real time updates to your customer service cases being closed.

Your account data changing, and your sales deals advancing.

And since chatter is also a social platform, we can even bring in updates from nonsalesforce

Applications like your back end and finance or HR systems.

Your feed puts all your content apps and people updates right in front of you, all in one place,

All in real time.

Plus, chatter makes it easy to filter your feed to find the most relevant information.

You can create any kind of filter you want.

You can filter on just your team, or filter by your top sales deals.

Here we can see that a new competitor has been identified one of our technologies opportunity.

Right from the feed we can drill into the deal and take a closer look.

On the opportunity page, but your deal also has its own feed.

Now you can collaborate on this deal in real time.

When someone or some event updates this opportunity like this stage change, it automatically

Shows up in your feed, and in the feed of anyone else who is following this opportunity.

Here you can see someone is recommended you join this competitive group to get some more product

Insight.

Here’s the competitive group page.

Chatter lets you form groups instantly collaborate on anything.

Whether it’s a sales competitor, an HR project, product team or whatever you need.

One of the great things about chatter is that you can also pull in information from other social

Networking sites like Twitter.

Here you have a Twitter widget that’s pulling in real time tweets about this competitor.

People in groups on chatter can also collaborate on files like photos, documents, spreadsheets

Or presentations.

Here’s a presentation someone on the preview group posted about our competition which you can

Preview right.

Plus, with chatter, you can also access all your application content and data on your mobile

Device.

With the iPhone or blk berry.

No matter where you go chatter makes sure you’ve got your real time updates right at your fingertips.

Chatter is the new way to collaborate with your content, apps and people.

Securely and in real time.

It will make you and your company more productive and give you real time insights that lead

To smarter decisions.

To learn more visit salesforce.Com/chatter.

>> So, anyway, just a brief history on Steve.

Steve and I have started software company together in 1979 called Liberty Software we wrote

10 entertainment titles.

We were in high school.

And then we went to college.

Steve went to Stanford.

He taught computer science at Stanford then he worked at Apple for many years, working on a

Number of their projects, including started a lot of their early Internet work then went to

AT&T and he’s been with salesforce for five years.

So I’d like Steve now to just give you a little technical behind the scenes on exactly what

You just saw and how it works.

Steve.

>> Thanks, Mark.

So the core idea behind chatter is really seeing all the fantastic innovation happening on

The consumer side, really bringing the real time nature to the way people lead their lives

And recognizing that the enterprise, the enterprise is just not real time.

You’ve got your applications.

Databases.

We provide a suite of applications, many of the people provide applications, people adding,

Changing deleting, updating information on these databases lock within these databases.

You’ve got your content living on your file servers, and you’ve got people living inside of

Outlook, there’s no context or real time nature.

There’s no rapid communication, collaboration.

It’s really just, the consumer world has just left the enterprise behind.

And so the idea behind chatter is to bring those together, introduce the real time nature into

The enterprise where it’s sorely needed so that as change happens that I care about I know

About it.

I can collaborate.

I can come back to it.

And also extremely importantly, provide the context so that if I happen to not be paying attention

while it’s happening I can go back to the particular area that I care about and see what’s

Going on.

And doing that all in, not only delivering a social application, but delivering a platform

To allow the entire industry to innovate and bring that real time aspect to the enterprise.

Ly.

We’ll have the opportunity that we have but more importantly, that the entire industry has

To really innovate and improve and bring the level of innovation we’ve seen on the consumer

Side into the enterprise.

I’m sure a number of you have seen this.

So this is the new look and feel.

I’m curious, how many of you have seen salesforce our salesforce automation applications or

Any custom applications or users of salesforce.

So a few of you.

So a look and feel for our core application that would be available sometime early next year.

And you can see on here, it’s personalized with Marc.

In this case I’m acting as Marc.

People get us confused.

So there we go.

So now we’re bringing, picking what was the user, the model the data object behind the scenes,

Is really been unfamiliar in the enterprise world.

So if we can go and take a look at Mark’s profile

you’ll see all the familiar, all the familiar

Types of interactions that you see on the consumer world with this is effectively Mark’s wall

And you can see what’s going on right now.

Talking about chatter or maybe he’s congratulating me on my new promotion or something like

That.

Maybe not.

.

And so this is very familiar.

The typical style of interaction that we see in Facebook on Twitter, where people are commenting

>> I’ll talk before you move on past this page.

We really haven’t used the word “platform” yet.

>> How this whole thing is built on our force.Com platform.

While you’re seeing the fixed application, the whole thing I wanted to add, HMRS information.

I wanted to add more fields to this page.

I wanted to add information about me like I was an expert in certain areas, we’re working on

Certain projects.

Those all of a sudden become keywords or search terms or part of my groups and all that that

We fully extended our platform and that is really what’s what chatter is.

It’s a social extension to the force.Com development.

>> It’s a core extension of the platform at two levels.

If we go back to the home tab and take a look at the overall feed, which is of course where

We expect people really go to find out what’s going on and that feed is available either on

The browser but also on the desktop or on your mobile devices just like you’d expect.

This feed is really the core.

But any object in the entire force.Com database which they, an open database that people have

Built 135,000 custom applications on, recruiting applications, expense management applications,

Financial applications, just about everything you can imagine we might use at salesforce.

Now all those applications have things associated with them.

They have fees associated with them.

When I’m interested in a certain object or a certain person, or a certain piece of content,

Or even to find a rule describing I’m interested in all bugs related to the next release, and

I want to know when they’re being closed.

Now all of that will come to the feed.

Not only the people and people actually talking to each other, but as you can see here we’ve

Got the allied technologies opportunities.

So that’s a deal in the system.

So this is an example where an object is talking to me, an application is talking to me, not

Just a person talking to me.

And people are commenting on that.

>> And as just an extension of what Steve said, he lightly touched on this.

But while we were at dreamforce Computer Associates announced they’ve created a application

Natively on our salesforce.Com around the scrum development methodology which a lot of our

Customers we use and so forth and many others use, but managing scrum is an incredibly different

Thing.

Not only have we built the software development around scrum but the whole idea now is that

That is now just because they’ve built it natively in our platform, it now is basically enabled

By chatter so that as bugs as sprint teams do their work, as key tasks and activities happen,

In that application or whatever application it is, we have over 135,000 custom applications

On our platform, all of them are enabled by the objects that Steve is now referencing here

Which is that we have basically given all aspects of force.Com and all applications that we

Make as well as the 850 apps on the app exchange are now all enabled with all the features

That you’re seeing.

>> So developers can build on top of chatter and their applications can become information

That feeds into chatter.

>> And existing salesforce customers are 70,000 customers.

This happens automatically.

And we are not charging them any additional money for this capability.

This will just turn on in the release that is happening in early 2010.

>> Is this going to be the new home page?

>> That’s what Steve just said.

He just showed you the new home page.

If you go back to home, go back to home.

>> Can you show us what the current home page is?

>> Thank you for asking me.

Thanks for paying attention to the presentation, Erick.

This is the home page.

>> You didn’t show it.

>> This is the salesforce home page.

I’m glad this is on video.

We will review with you later.

>> I’m glad I’m not the only one tired.

>> This is going to be the new home page.

>> This is going to be the new home page.

And then you can see my status update.

You can see the chatter feed but it’s closed.

Dashboards are real time analytics coming into our system.

A lot of our customers.

We deliver over 700

700,000 dashboards for our customers a day, and two million reports.

Many of those customers ask for real time feeds from those into their dashboards as

into

Their home page as they log in.

If you go down, we also have an approvals and work flow engine in our system that’s giving

Us real time approval requirements where we can now prove on our home page which is our calendaring

System or can also be real time integrated with other calendaring systems like Google and Outlook

As well as tasks that we need to complete, you know, I need to either go call this person or

Get this done.

However, now if Dan scrolls all the way back up, all of those things are on the home page today.

What’s not on the home page today is two things.

Left, the things on the left, which are these filters, and the thing on the top that says chatter.

Me Mark says this, George says this.

Parker says this.

And Steve says this.

But not just that.

It says: Your purchase order system says this.

Your scrum application says this.

Your CSL system says this.

Your marketing system says this.

Your PowerPoint presentation just told you that it got updated.

You look at the customer and he says it sucks but he made changes and now it’s better and he

Upped, and the Oracle HR system says to you.

And oh, by the way, other feeds are coming in from other outside vendors as well.

Tom son Reuters is feeding information to you.

Dow Jones is feeding information to you.

You know, maybe you’re hooked into other news providers.

TechCrunch.

>> Is there a Twitter feed in there.

>> We showed the Twitter.

We’ll go back and show you the Twitter

I’m glad

this is great we can go back.

Thank you for setting it up for me.

And I needed the energy, really, Erick.

So so now I have the whole feed, and I have the ability to go through this.

Now, for example, when I’m working on like this Allied Technology

all of our objects are

Just generic, you can rename that object.

You can change all these fields.

Can you change these page layouts but what we’ve added to all our core database objects, you’ve

Got these feeds.

So the database is talking to you.

So now when you click on chatter, that database

the table, kind of what was almost an audit

Trail is alive.

And I can comment on that object.

The object is commenting on itself.

Bearing the privacy model that’s in place by the 30,000 users who use this at Merrill Lynch.

The 25,000 users at Cisco.

The 30,000 users at Dell.

You know, the thousands of users, the 70,000 users that Japan posts at Tokyo.

The sharing models and privacy models and security models to make sure that private data stays

Private.

And only the right people see the right things.

It’s in place.

And that is the combination.

Because the whole idea behind enterprise is key.

But deliver the real time prize, we have to leverage what we’re in the consumer world because

That’s what the action is.

>> You see Facebook are half a billion on these new met fors if we can leverage, take the

Data that’s in the enterprise to these enterprise users, and that’s really what this is trying

To

>> But the companies that are using it.

>> That’s exactly, or whatever the projects, you know we have project management systems.

We have over 800 applications on our App exchange.

Group that you see there, you know, and we bring up the competitive group, of course, you can

Group users into groups.

And they can be your account team.

And they can be your product team.

These are people who are now working together and they themselves have a profile.

And they, of course, have a wall, because they’re a group, and they can set up Twitter feeds

As well.

So that’s what’s right on the right there, that this

tracking.

>> What are they tracking?

>> Actually coming out of

this is not

this is our live development system.

This is a SharePoint.

This is SharePoint on Twitter.

The search term that we’re tracking is SharePoint fail.

And it says Ger, why won’t the OWA documents feature accept an external URL for DIF points

For SharePoint location.

Would you unzoom, Dan.

Go into the back end.

Zoom freezes it.

Zoom back in, Dan.

Dear IT why implement SharePoint as a collaboration tool but not enable ability to have accounts

Collaborate with external clients I wonder whose fault is that SharePoint 2007 NITX, XMF.

>> Don’t call it salesforce for nothing.

>> You didn’t plan that?

>> This is live.

>> This is live.

>> It’s real time.

>> There’s this thing going on, I gotta tell you about, when we get a chance, have lunch.

>> You take it from SharePoint 2010 doesn’t install at all on windows 2008.

>> Notice he can read it now.

>> You would have thought that you would be tested

well, it’s going too fast.

>> Can we just

now that we see

I just want to tell a little story.

>> Erick had to get me going just a little bit.

Scobold will try to get me going, too.

>> Before we get Scobold into this then we’re really in trouble.

>> Cut him off.

>> Gee, who knew.

>> That’s all right.

>> A couple of years ago, Marc, I started getting these strange late night Facebook messages

From you.

You know, I’d post something.

>> I hope you don’t take them the wrong way.

>> No, I didn’t.

I turned them over to my attorney.

[LAUGHTER]

But the thing is you really use this stuff.

>> Of course.

>> So somehow, though, you’ve taken something that you were fascinated with.

>> I’m deeply

I love technology.

I love software.

I love

we’ve been working on, since Apple 2.

Commodore, assembly language, but we’ve loved this stuff for 30 years.

And we love this, and we love the Facebook, is unbelievable.

And I have 5,000 users on my, friends, I mean my closest friends on Facebook.

>> And there’s me.

>> And my close friend, Steve.

>> But the thing that is amazing, Steve, about Facebook, the thing that just blows my mind,

Is why do I know more about the these strangers than I do about my own employees.

That’s the thing.

I’m learning so much about people on Facebook.

When they tag each other.

When they’re commenting.

Where they’re going.

It’s amazing how much I’m learning.

I am smarter about people I don’t even know about and have never met than people who are basically

My most important employees and what they’re working on.

I am learning why is it so easy to tag things on Facebook but I can’t

it’s time for a big

CrunchUp in the enterprise.

>> Question: On that point.

>> Turn the audience mic on, please.

>> Question: Marc on that point salesforce is only used by a small number of people inside

Corporations, it’s used by salespeople.

Why aren’t you ripping it this out and making available to the entire enterprise for a low

Cost, because you’re charging

>> Yes, we are.

Thank you for doing my marketing strategy.

As usual, why should today be any different?

No.

We are.

And first of all we’re including this for free for all salesforce users.

And then we have a low priced version which includes our full content management product and

A full force.Com development license, and we have all this technology, which basically starts

At $50 a user a month.

And then we’re working on a free version that we’re not ready to unveil yet because we’re just

Not settled on the features and function, because we needed the feedback from the conference

Because we’re showing this for the first time.

And you are 100 percent right.

We have a number of enterprise license agreements with large customers.

Like Dell, who has 80,000 users.

On our service.

They can deploy this enterprise-wide.

But for a lot of our customers, like Bank of America, who has 290,000 employees, we only have

30,000 employees, which is their financial advisors.

We have two million total users, about 67,000, approximately, implementation.

>> So you’ll make this available?

>> We’re working on figuring out what that is, yes.

>> What are you going to call that, chatter Lite.

>> I think that’s news.

>> We don’t know.

We said this at the conference.

But if you had come to the conference, I know it was a long way to go since it was

it was

100 yards away.

>> I wasn’t here yesterday.

>> You don’t have to explain yourself.

>> I watched on it the Web.

>> That’s right.

>> It’s not just status updates.

Like we’ve

this is deep integration between the fundamental, the fundamental transactions

Of your company.

The transaction is kind of, as Jim Gray defined a transaction, now the reason we were able

To get this done so quickly is we were already auditing all of our transactions, in fact, we

Have three and a half billion custom object records on over half, half a million custom objects

That our customers have created, and we have to keep audit trails for all of these transactions,

Especially the banks and the insurance companies that we run, like Aon and others.

And because we have those audit trails on our objects, basically those are just very pretty

Audit trails.

They look like Facebook.

They look like Twitter.

But really just exposing the fundamental audit trails and then we’re doing something else.

We’re providing that linkage between the content, the apps and the people.

So that when I go into an object, it’s not just saying I was created, I was read.

I was updated, I deleted, which was the crud characteristics of a database transaction.

But then I can say, oh, no, this means this.

So like if it’s an account object or an account table.

I can say this account is, you know, doing great.

They’ve adopted all of our technology.

You know, basically I can add meta data.

I’m adding meta data on top of that.

>> ERP systems and enterprise systems have always been about getting real time enterprise

Data and getting it to the right people.

But they’ve done a horrible job of doing that.

I think what you’re saying here is that these consumer apps are creating a UI that is, that

Makes a lot more sense.

>> Aren’t we like a slaved

I feel like many times I’m like having to constantly deal with

The e-mails.

But then my content management system is its own island of data and then my enterprise apps

Are their own islands of data.

And I think what we’ve seen with Facebook and Twitter is that we can provide a user interface

That is, provide meaning, meaning to these enterprise users of all of this information.

And somehow by bringing it together in this synthesis, we can take it another level.

The other really cool thing is you saw with the filters, is that because I’m basically able

To provide queries on tops of huge amounts of data but also through, because there’s an API,

That you can now write to, to feed all of the systems, as well.

You don’t have to just use our managed framework but there’s an application program you can

Plug into.

There’s so many great data providers whether you’re a content provider or whether you’re a,

You’re providing stock quotes or news stores stories or credit information, or whatever, you

Can plug into this.

Now the power of that, let’s say I’m managing an account object, right?

So let’s say I’m managing account.

Can we go back to the account object like I was showing you?

Think about this.

You not only have the account object, that is, the account, whatever it is, you don’t like

The no SharePoint logo.

>> It’s like the no software logo.

>> That one is extremely good.

Same guy came up with both of them.

>> Funny you said you love software because we don’t have software.

>> I love software.

And, look, I love technology.

Here’s the account object.

Here’s the account.

It’s got Google integrated.

I’ve got Google mapped to the account.

I’ve got meta and what opportunities on this account that I’m working on.

Cases, this is typical salesforce automation.

I showed you this nine years ago.

You know, you were across the street at the other magazine.

Business 2.0.

Now, go back up.

This page we’ve had for a long time.

But that little thing at the top, the little chattering teeth now I click on that now I have

Meta data and integrated data.

So I have the meta data which is Jim steel our chief customer officer saying allied technologies,

This thing is hot.

.

Let’s make this

It’s the AP speaking, they’ve completed a transaction, that they just fulfilled an order on

This account.

So SAP basically said, oh, hey, by the way, I just got an order from them on the website.

And click here and I’m going to bring you into the SAP screen.

Or Oracle said: Oh, this invoice, because I use Oracle for the payables, I clicked here for

Oracle and I click on that

>> What happens when you get confused between apps with people.

>> Let me finish this thought then I’ll any is your question.

Or I’ve hooked into TechCrunch’s API or I’ve hooked into Thompson Reuters am.

PI or Dow Jones or maybe something else here.

And I’m tracking Allied Technologies and all of a sudden there’s an icon there and it says

TechCrunch, Steve Gillmor says Allied Technologies suction.

sucks, what are they doing they’ve got a bug in their system.

Right away I’ll see that information.

That’s the power.

And because I’m following allied technology I’m also going to get that on my home page.

If my competitive group is following it, they’re going to get it in their wall.

And this is really the next

this is exciting.

And this also means that salesforce is becoming a type of a distribution network for information.

That we’re able to filter correctly because we know people are interested in Allied Technology

In this deal, in this product, in this competitive thing.

We become a distribution network, not just an application provider.

But for our users.

So that you can plug into us, because you’re a content

you’re of course a great website.

You provide you tweet and you do all these things but you’re a content provider.

You can plug in your real time media into our network, and we can actually bring it to people

Where they’re going to actually maybe see that but they might not otherwise have seen it because

We know that they’re working on these things.

And that this is important to them.

>> Do you think that this is

>> Does that make sense.

>> Is there an advertising model?

>> I was basically going to ask.

Do you think this is kind of a reboot of the media publishing.

>> We published this 48 hours ago.

While I completely respect his comments and your comments, we’re not that far into it.

We’re looking for feedback.

And this is the first time I’m kind of trying to explain our general strategy and why I brought

Steve to explain the technology, because we want the feedback because we think this is a unique

Concept.

Look, we’ve poked fun at SharePoint quite a few times, but the reality is they’re releasing

SharePoint 2010.

All of our customers are asking to upgrade their servers.

You can put a website on it.

You can put like a wiki on it.

And it’s completely unintegrated basically with everything else.

And it’s just not

it’s very old technology.

And we need to move this industry forward.

That’s what this conference is about.

A lot of people in this room are doing this.

Microsoft kind of continues to hold us back.

SharePoint is the latest thing that they use to kind of hold onto their status quo.

Cash cow servers.

You know, we need some new things.

So here’s our stake in the ground around collaboration.

We’re already in the sales business.

You know that, sales automation.

We’re in the customer service and support business.

Call centers contact centers, portals we do 8,000 customers with that and we’re in the custom

Application development business for ISVs.

>> Have you been testing this.

>> This is the fourth area, collaboration that we’re entering.

>> This is our fourth cloud.

>> Have you been testing chatter, user

>> I’m testing it right now I’m watching everybody to see if they like it or not.

>> Do you think there will be more user interaction through this user interface than through

Your current user interface?

>> I think the social media guys on the consumer side, you know, I quit my job at Oracle in

1996 because I was using Amazon.Com, and I’m like, this app just rocks it’s so much better

Than what we’re doing in our enterprise group.

Why are we building financials and CRM and all this stuff that looks like green screens on

3270 terminals, and I quit my job.

And in ‘99 I basically started salesforce so that I could

I didn’t quit my job in ‘96.

But I probably should have.

Looking back at it.

But in 1999, when I did quit my job, I started salesforce, and all we did was take Amazon.

It’s not like we were rocket scientists.

We took that architecture, and we built salesforce automation.

Now we’re basically again looking to the consumer world, the metaphors that are being popularized,

Like feeds, like profiles.

You know, like groups.

These are great things, and then we can take great computer science and other things that we’ve

Built to deploy what we think is maybe the next generation.

We think, you know, he and I have had a lot of talks.

And I think that what he’s been talking about for now for a couple of years is dead on on this

Real time.

Steve, I’m sure everyone in this room knows, and if you don’t know, Steve Gillmor was talking

About real time in the enterprise before me, before anybody.

And he is 100 percent right.

He wrote the first articles on it.

The first everything.

And what we’re trying to do is take these ideas, and we’re trying to actually implement them

But on our development platform, and within our application framework so that we can do it.

And this is the thing.

So you know, because we’ve been working together for nine, or 10 years now, that we’re passionate

About software as a service, no software, scalability.

Democracitization of applications, but collaboration is the next one that’s got to happen.

And why should the great thing that’s happening only be on the consumer side.

Because I mean I think it’s really cool that I can follow Ashton on Twitter and millions of

People are doing that.

But why can’t I follow my PowerPoint presentations?

Why can’t I follow on with what’s going on with my key products.

>> Let’s have people come up to the mic.

We’re a little bit over on time.

But

>> A few questions from the audience.

>> Go ahead.

>> Question: Alex Williams.

You write Web.

Over the past few days you talked about for instance what Dell is doing with Answers, be able

To pull that information, create knowledge bases out of Facebook.

What about the contact lists?

Within Facebook?

And being able to export that information?

>> Only in so much as users want to move that information around.

Otherwise we can just deploy that as a real time feed.

Using Facebook as a service.

You know, that’s one of the great things about the net.

Is that all these things are architected with these great APIs.

So we don’t need to manage the data.

I mean, if the customer wants us to manage the data, it’s probably because of a security reason.

Or because of a sharing or a privacy area.

That’s our expertise.

That’s our core.

That’s why we have the iso certifications and every transaction SSL, and we have our identity

Protection systems, and all of those things.

That’s our core, our sharing models and our customers are 27,000 customers have set up the

Fundamental and key architecture, security architecture to their company.

That’s a huge investment they’ve met in the meta data, in our systems.

And now we’re enabling that through this user interface.

But this is just one.

And also here’s the thing you’ve got to remember about salesforce.Com.

Of course, we are an infrastructure layer.

First and foremost, we are a multi-tenant meta-driven server.

That’s number one.

Number two is we have a huge infrastructure layer that we, ranging from security to scalability,

Reliability, availability.

Number three is we have a development platform to let our customers build their own applications.

Which is our force.Com environment.

Now we’ve added chatter, which is a social development platform so that you as ISVs can build

Apps that make sense for our customers or for your own customers or for customers that don’t

Exist yet.

And then we add apps on top of this comprehensive integrated architecture.

These are not separate servers.

These are not separate apps.

These are not separate services.

That’s not how we do it.

Other vendors do it in a different way.

Obviously, Microsoft has lots of servers.

Oracle has lots of servers that are all getting upgraded and updated in various levels of order.

Different service providers also have siloed services, that have kind of a similar model.

We are a fully integrated comprehensive service with one API that

a bulk load API you can

>> Let’s get a few more questions in.

Lili is in the audience would like to respond to all this Microsoft bashing, feel free to come

Up to the mic.

>> I’m not bashing Microsoft.

I’m just explaining why they’re a monopoly, because they hold onto the status quo through this

Cash cow mechanism of the operating

I just upgraded my PC.

I have a new P C&I wanted to upgrade.

And I upgraded, and I paid for this upgrade.

It’s called Windows 7.

Let me tell you I upgraded I got no new new features.

Fantastic business model.

How do I get this.

If you upgrade

>> The new features that works.

>> You know what, this is insane that we even tolerate this in our industry.

We laugh about it.

Yes, oh it’s a company and you upgrade to get the features fixed and you have to pay.

But ha, ha, ha.

Come on, are we tired of this?

We pay companies like Oracle and SAP, our customers pay them 22 percent maintenance year after

Year for software that was written 10 and 20 years ago that hasn’t been upgradeed and updated

And customers are just forced to tolerate it.

It’s the same thing.

We need new models.

>> Thank you from for switching from Microsoft to Oracle bashing.

>> I didn’t want to just stay in one area.

>> You did great.

>> I didn’t want to give you the show you wanted, Steve.

>> [Indiscernible] I’ve been working in large corporation enterprises recently there’s two

Challenges.

One is the people challenge in collaboration enterprise and the other one is IT department

Bottleneck and you’ve made inroads with salesforce into the enterprise on that front.

But we see a lot of issues widening that into internal collaboration.

>> Yes.

>> By IT departments protecting their turf.

How do you see those walls falling?

>> I see exactly what you said.

I see that, of course, we have IT departments who, A, need collaboration, just like you’re

Saying, there are cultural challenges.

You do have a clash of civilizations regarding on premise and cloud computing.

We know that is happening.

And there’s a rationalization happening.

And it depends a lot on the country, actually.

It depends on a lot the size of company.

And it depends a lot on the, Jeff Moore has this great thing called technology adoption curve.

It has a lot to do with where the CIO is on the adoption curve and their own consciousness,

In terms of them being willing to look at new ideas.

We see it for years.

I see Sam Whitmore in the audience.

I used to go see Sam in 1989 when I was at Oracle talking about Macks and PCs front end corporation

Information systems and CIOs were kicking us out saying, now we’re going deck backs imperpetuity.

Now basically 20 years later most not only do most people in the room don’t even know what

Deck vaks or VMS is, we used to be their neighbor in Boston.

The company doesn’t even exist.

That’s what’s great about our industry, that we are riding innovation, which is constantly

Getting lower cost and easier to use technology out there and we’re all on this technology

Continuum and it’s kind of at an unseen level and it’s moving forward it’s like this tremendous

Vehicle.

And we are all, all have the obligation to drive that paradigm forward.

And for those companies who don’t latch on to that technology continuum, that somehow use it

For their own selfish advantages, and I hope that salesforce never becomes one of those that

I think it’s an abuse of power in many ways.

And that’s why I am a proponent that we have to use technology.

We have to drive its cost down.

We have to make it easier to use and ultimately we have to make it for the good of other people.

And we don’t have time for that speech.

But it’s in my book, though, under force for change.

There’s a chapter on it.

>> Last question.

>> Question: Hello.

We heard a lot of blogs and a lot of places that you talked personally to Soho that you wanted

To buy them out.

Is that true.

Did you want to buy them and what do you think of them and are you still in talks with them?

>> No, you know, look, there’s so many companies out there and I’m sure everybody talks to

Us at lots of different levels.

You know, we have 4,000 employees and there’s lots of conversations happening with tens of

Thousands of companies, but the reality is we’ve only looked at buying a few companies over

Ten years, because as Steve will tell you, we’re working at a very core level in our systems

Architecture.

It’s very hard for us to buy anybody.

And I’m not that familiar with this company.

But there’s a lot of great companies out there.

But for us to bring any technology in, it’s very hard, because if you go back to that one slide,

You’ll see at that bottom level, our meta data architecture is extremely sophisticated, wrapped

By our privacy and sharing model.

And you know, I’m not saying that we won’t look at buying companies in the future or that,

I can of course never comment on any kind of merger or acquisition, but the thing is it’s very

Hard for us to buy companies.

That’s why we bought like Sindia mobile enablement every AP you build runs automatically on

The iPhone and Blackberry, our content management system, our knowledge management system.

These are things that we bought but then we had to completely rewrite into our architecture.

>> And the fact that

>> I hope that answers your question.

Thank you very much.

>> The fact people can tap into the platform and all these different APIs makes it not as

Necessary to buy these companies because you can tap into them.

>> Isn’t that the new world we’re in.

Isn’t that where we’re all trying to go?

Isn’t chatter hopefully make TechCrunch a better company?

Isn’t it a possibility that now we can bring your content to our users and so our users can

Get value from the work that you guys are doing, and the work that others are doing here?

We’re trying to build open frameworks that are based on open standards.

That’s why we’ve

you know, completely integrated all the Google apps.

When you put your Google user name and your Google password into salesforce.Com, all kinds

Of new features and functions open up for you.

We’ve deeply integrated with Google.

Not just Google Maps like you saw but Google Mail, the spreadsheets, all of their capabilities.

And all this stuff awedly case kAdz and we’re doing that with other companies, too, where we

Can look inside their WSDLs and APIs to reveal features and functionalities for users all in

Real time so when you update your Google spreadsheet.

He’s got it actually on the demo.

You update your Google spreadsheet it appears in your feed in real time.

This Google app has been updated.

This Google spreadsheet has been upgraded.

This traffic just appeared near the this account that you’re on your way to.

It’s happening with your feeds.

.

I mentioned a lot of our partners we have if you go to appexchange.Com you’ll see over 850

Apps and services deeply integrated at that level and soon all of those will start appearing

In these feeds, enabling our users with the very concept of the real time enterprise.

Letting them CrunchUp, CrunchUp.

It’s great.

I agree, we need a CrunchUp.

And we need to go real time.

We need to get into the new world.

I’m sorry my energy is so low.

>> All right.

>> It’s been a long week.

>> Congratulations.

>> You’re probably two years ahead of your competition, right?

>> Is that it?

That’s the total analysis?

>> How long

>> Steve, come on, it’s not our total analysis of this.

>> You said I invented this.

So I’m saying congratulations.

>> Thank you very much.

>> Congratulations to you.

Because I do have to say that Steve was

I mean, it’s empirical.

I’m sure all of you know that you can go back and read his blogs that he was the first one,

And we read this stuff and this is how we

we don’t come up

we don’t have that many ideas

On our own.

We are looking for things and we’re trying to figure out how to take our fundamental premise

Which is everything’s moving into the cloud and that we can provide into a democratized way.

>> But you’re putting a lot of wood behind this arrow.

>> We’ve completely rewritten our architecture around this concept of real time enterprise,

Yes.

>> Well, I want to thank Marc Benioff.

>> Thanks for Steve and Dan for being here.

>> I think this is a big bet.

And you know, the fact that you are doing it first, very curious to see how fast other your

Competitors are going to try to follow this.

>> I think it will be difficult for them.

We were going to explain why.

But this is not tacked on.

This is not some feed running on the side or somebody typing in status updates, running a feed

On the side.

This is deeply integrated into our core, what we’ve done.

And it was just really honestly a fluke, because we had to do this compliance work for these

Large banks and financial institutions, that we had the concept of feeds buried into our core

Systems and then we’re able to kind of hear of these words that we’re able to kind of able

To dress them up and make them usable for customers and create more value.

It is a complete coincidence.

That’s really

is that right, Steve?

>> That’s right.

>> Anything else you would want to say on that one piece?

>> I think it was coincidence of the compliance combined with the deep sharing model and security

Model so that we felt free to liberate that information in a way that would not compromise

Our customers’ concerns over privacy.

Those two things combined.

As well as things like mobile support, all the things we have.

All these innovations we’ve been creating unknowingly led to our ability to expose this information

To the field which was really the true innovation to make the enterprise real time.

>> I want to thank Steve Gillmor really for this, because we had some of it but we would not

Have known.

>> Well, thank you.

>> What’s interesting your relationships with members of the media, you don’t treat the media

As observers.

You treat them as participants.

And

>> Sam, you’re going to have to tell them that that’s not true.

>> Okay.

>> Thank you.

>> They are.

The media is a critical part of our ecosystem of our industry.

They’re not just pundits.

They’re not just observers.

In many cases they’re prophetic.

They’re seeing things we don’t see.

You see thousands of companies.

We don’t see it where we rely on that.

And also the industry and analysts too, regulators all this kind of thing, these are really

Important people, too.

Not all of them but some of them are.

>> With that, can you please give Marc a hand.

Thank you very much.

>> Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Thank you TechCrunch.

f you want two tickets.

>> Just explain why.

>> Explain why you want to go to LeWeb.

He’ll pick it and what’s the time period?

>> Next hour?

>> Tonight.

>> By tonight.

>> Yeah.

>> Explain in one tweet why you want to go.

>> By 8:00 p.M. Tonight.

Two tickets.

>> 1500 Euros each.

>> That’s 1500 Euros each.

Julian, congratulations

Photo Credit/Flickr:TheKenYeung

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We’re here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the keynote and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings yesterday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce’s offerings but is the future of the company’s products. Benioff has even praised Twitter for making the transition between the cloud and real-time web seamless.

Today, Salesforce is making its own venture into the stream with Salesforce Chatter which allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be connected. In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will be able to tap into Chatter.

Salesforce Chatter will let users post profiles, like on Facebook, which include things like contact information, area of expertise, work history and a photo. The social network will also include the ability to post real-time status updates. And Salesforce is tapping into the real-time stream that will feature status updates, not only from people, but also from content and apps. Content will notify users in the Salesforce Chatter feed when new or updated content is available. Apps will join the conversation by posting when there is a change in status, like when an opportunity closes or a case is escalated in Salesforce CRM. Salesforce Chatter will also allow users to create groups within the social network.

Similar to Facebook, users will be able to post content, like documents, spreadsheets and presentations, in Salesforce Chatter’s feed. Companies can decide which employees have access to certain information on a network, with a multi-tenant sharing model.

Of course, Salesforce Chatter will enable users to filter the most relevant Twitter feeds into their Chatter app. For example, a user can set-up a Twitter search for a competitor and automatically stream the real-time results into Chatter. Employees will also be able to pull information from their Facebook profiles to auto populate their Salesforce Chatter profiles.

Any native app built on the Force.com platform can stream updates to Salesforce Chatter’s feed. And with all salesforce.com apps, Salesforce Chatter will be available on the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile devices or iPhone. Salesforce Chatter is currently scheduled to become available in calendar year 2010 and will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter will also be sold for $50 per user per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com.

Benioff says that Salesforce Chatter is the “magic of Facebook and Twitter brought to the enterprise.” But the feed itself looks similar to FriendFeed.

Benioff will also be revealing more about Salesforce Chatter and his real-time strategy at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday, November 20.

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Here are a few of the bigger UI changes: As you can see in the screenshot, there’s a new set of horizontal tabs to better filter content. Xobni is also now surfacing links exchanged between contacts for the first time — previously, there was just a way to do this for files exchanged. Also new, the Twitter extension element now includes a direct message (DM) option. LinkedIn support has been improved, as has some of the analytics.

There are a half dozen or so other enhancements to the client such as extensions now being resizable, and better drag and drop support. There’s also finally a way for users to easily open a folder that emails reside in. Basically, if you’re addicted to Xobni, there’s a lot of little tweaks (and some bigger ones) to try out.

But again, the big news is that Xobni is opening premium extensions to users — and not just business users, all Xobni users. If Xobni is able to effectively convince users to buy these (as well as get more beyond just Salesforce), it could be a decent new revenue stream for the company. Back in July, the company introduced ‘Xobni Plus’, the premium version of their product. Revenue streams can be addicting when turned on, it seems.

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With all of its SaaS offerings, Salesforce.com is consistently integrating with other forms of cutting edge technologies, such as Twitter, Box.net, and more to offer clients more diverse and appealing options. Today, the company is partnering with Adobe to offer the “Adobe Flash Builder,” off of Force.com, Salesforce’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications.

The new offering is meant to allow developers and IT departments to build cloud-based rich media applications off of Force.com. Developers can use Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com to extend or enhance existing Salesforce CRM implementations and custom-built Force.com applications, or build entirely new applications to meet business needs.

Within the new offering, Adobe’s Flash Builder lets users build these cloud-based internet application that can be deployed to end-users via the browser though Adobe’s Flash Player or to the desktop through Adobe AIR.

The builder lets developers interactive UI features easily, such as drag and drop technology. Developers can also add data visualization such as charts and dashboards for better management and monitoring of applications. The new builder is also integrated with Adobe LiveCycle Data Services that lets clients automatically synchronize data between the Force.com database and an desktop-based Adobe AIR local data store, allowing developers to build apps that easily connect between the browser and the desktop. A screenshot of a application built with the Adobe Flash Builder is posted below.

Salesforce recently upgraded its Force.com platform by launching Force.com Sites, an application that lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. In terms of the enterprise, this is a big coup for Adobe’s Flash platform, which faces competition from Microsoft’s Silverlight product.

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To get started, businesses need to sign up for Box.net’s enterprise plan, which includes free access to the Salesforce app. As an added bonus, any businesses using the new Salesforce integration will be eligible for unlimited storage on Box.net — something that the service’s normal enterprise customers don’t have. Box.net will also offer access to the Salesforce app to customers using the ‘Business’ level account (which is for smaller companies), though it won’t come with unlimited storage.

CEO Aaron Levie says that this is the first step in Box.net’s plan to give businesses a secure way to share their files across multiple services on the web. He says that many of the cloud services geared toward the enterprise don’t work well together — oftentimes you’ll have to reupload the same content to multiple sites to share or edit it. Box.net wants to help unify these services by serving as the central hub for your uploaded files, which you can then access from these other web-based services. Levie hints that we’ll be seeing more integrations with other services in the near future.

For more details, check out the demo video below:

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NetSuite, a company that provides cloud-based business management software suites, is furthering its mobile strategy by launching a free iPhone app to compliment its web-based products. The iPhone app gives NetSuite users on-the-go access to the company’s on-demand SaaS offerings, which include real-time dashboards with financial and customer data from CRMs and other applications.

A competitor to Salesforce.com, NetSuite offers four main types of cloud computing software: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), CRM, accounting, and ecommerce software. In any business, mobile access makes business processes speedier, so NetSuite has tried to make the crossover between the web and the iPhone (or iPod touch) seamless.

With the new app, users get real-time access to their NetSuite calendar and task lists, including the ability to accept or decline events and mark tasks complete. With respect to the CRM, sales reps can see leads, view client purchase history and contacts, and review past orders. Users can also access accounting information, browse financial trends and graphs, read performance indicator reports and receive and generate detailed financial scorecards.

NetSuite faces competition primarily from tech giants Salesforce.com and Microsoft, which both offer business application suites such as CRMs and ERPs. Salesforce has had an iPhone app (as well as apps for Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices) to compliment its products since early this year and has similar functionality to NetSuite’s app. Of course the larger picture for most companies is whether they trust all of their business data going in the cloud and then within an app, but as more and more companies become increasingly comfortable with the idea of the cloud, this concern is minimized.

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While August and early September tends to be slow in the Valley, Salesforce.com has had a quite a big month. The CRM vendor posted strong earnings for the second quarter of 2009; just announced a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; rolled out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses; and opened up its Force.com platform to outside vendors. Today, Salesforce.com CEO and Founder Marc Benioff is taking the stage at an event in San Francisco to announce more news and speak about the company’s strategy, the Service Cloud 2 and the power of Twitter. Here are my notes from his presentation:

Benioff says that the Service Cloud has had “spectacular performance” in a difficult economy, which is one of the reasons Salesforce is focusing on continuous improvement. Benioff says that Salesforce is the “cloud computing evangelist” as the company tries to push for platforms and applications in the cloud. Benioff draws special attention to the SMBs as clients, which can run on the same software and platforms as large companies.

Benioff highlights the real-time cloud, saying that applications and platforms need to deliver this value. Real-time is crucial to Salesforce’s offerings and Benioff emphasizes that real-time is the future of the company’s products.

Addressing the capabilities of the Service Cloud, Benioff says that call center technology is outdated and can’t leverage the power of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. According to Benioff, the customer can save “millions of dollars” by using the service cloud and its “next-generation” innovations.

Benioff really focused on the power of Twitter in the CRM, saying the microblogging network has “incredible capabilities” around the world. Twitter in itself, he says, is a tremendous knowledge base. Jason Goldman, a board member of Twitter, says that the Service Cloud 2 is taking conversations that take place on Twitter to another level. He says that the platform is one of the best examples he’s seen of using Twitter to help businesses.

Goldman emphasizes that Twitter is imperative to businesses in many ways, especially given its real-time nature. Building Twitter into building processes is what makes the Service Cloud 2 a powerful platform, says Goldman.

As I wrote yesterday, Salesforce is making an interesting play in the cloud, almost making the transition between the enterprise and the social web seamless. The Service Cloud 2’s integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google and the consumer internet is made possible because it is a cloud-based platform and Salesforce isn’t letting anyone forget this.

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And we are already seeing some impressive cloud-based apps that would have been much more difficult to build without these platforms. During the demos, for instance, Veodia showed an app for recording video in the cloud straight from a laptop’s camera—no uploading required. FathomDB is putting a relational database in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2), and Diomede Storage is offering its own cloud service with a twist: online storage where you can monitor the power consumption of each file and act accordingly.

Below are four video highlights from the roundtable that followed the demos. In the first video, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff argues that “we are on the threshold of fundamentally a new paradigm of computing.” He defines cloud computing both as as software-as-a-service and as platform-as-a-service (and judging by how many cloud platforms were represented at the event, it seems like everyone wants to be the latter).

In the second video, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains why Amazon is in the cloud computing business in the first place, and says that overall for cloud computing in general: “This is still Day One.” We talked a lot about how enterprise apps are starting to look more and more like consumer Web apps, partly because they are both being built on similar back-end cloud architectures. But in the third video, Google’s Vic Gundotra takes exception to the idea that enterprise apps mimicking consumer apps is anything new.

And in the final video, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini talks about the importance of video in the cloud and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit talks about how consumers don’t care where all the data and applications are stored, but that applications on different cloud platforms nevertheless have to be able to seamlessly interact with each other. (As a side note, the reason I am on a video screen in some of these clips is because I joined the event remotely).

To watch the video highlights, just click through the playlist below. For those interested in watching more, you can watch the entire three hours of the event here.

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A year ago Salesforce integrated adwords tracking into their platform. Then two months ago we heard rumors that the companies were planning on deeper product integration – it turned out to be the complete integration of Google Apps (Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk) and Salesforce’s online enterprise apps.

With the most recent announcement Google in effect became Salesforce’s productivity suite. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentation can be created from within Salesforce’s CRM application. GTalk works as the de facto instant messenger within Salesforce. With one click, sales people who use Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce, where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle. Sales events and marketing campaigns can be overlayed onto a Google Calendar, as well as colleague’s schedules for figuring out convenient meeting times.

So what will the two companies announce later this month? Gundotra, who keynoted the recent Google I/O conference, is responsible for developer evangelism and open source programs at Google. That includes things like Android, Gears and Open Social. Connecting the dots isn’t too hard.

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I interviewed Guy King from Stateless for the CushyCMS launch in April (the post includes a demo video) and he mentioned then that the long-term plan for CushyCMS was to offer a professional subscription version. King tells me that the demand for a professional version of CushyCMS was strong from the day the service launched, so they immediately started building it. As of last week, the free version of CushyCMS has more than 4,600 active users, a tidy number given this isn’t an every day consumer based product.

CushyCMS is a simple content management system that aims to make life easier for web designers by simplifying content management. Web designers use CushyCMS to give content editors (for example a client) access to part, full or many pages at a granular level (headings, images, sidebars, etc), enabling them to update or create standards-compliant content directly from a browser without messing with the sites coding.

CushyCMS Pro is being offered at $28/month and features branding support, including a custom logo, colors and domain (e.g. acmedesign.clienteditor.com). There is no set-up fee or minimum subscription length and both PayPal and AlertPay are accepted.

In addition, several new features have been added to the free version of CushyCMS, including SFTP support (secure FTP), Improved WYSIWYG editor and Support for IIS and other Microsoft-based FTP servers.

Former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley edits The Inquisitr, a daily dose of tech, pop and penguins.

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Our sources in private equity say it was fueled by whispers of Google acquisition talks. And short sellers (Salesforce has a lot of them) may have moved to cover their positions, magnifying the rumor effect. 2.92 million shares traded today, about 55% more than average.

A week ago Google and Salesforce announced broad integration of Google Apps (Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk) and Salesforce’s online enterprise apps, which, our sources say, may just be a test of a more serious relationship.

If Google were to acquire Salesforce (and to be clear, we’re hearing nothing other than the private equity based rumors) it would likely be a cash deal to avoid earnings dilution. Salesforce is trading at an impressive 319 times forward earnings, compared to Google’s 32.66. Cisco and Oracle are said to be interested as well, but not Microsoft.

Here’s the interesting thing about the rumor – everything we hear from Silicon Valley sources says it isn’t happening. We’ve heard Google’s corporate development team is actually knee deep in another, much smaller transaction. And why put so much time into ironing out the elaborate business development deal announced last week if it’s only a prelude to an acquisition?

Salesforce’s Q1 financials will be announced on May 6.

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UserVoice offers a hosted way to harness the innovation and ideas of customers and potential customers that replaces email.

San Francisco based UserVoice improves the signal-to-noise of user opinion by allowing the moderation of the ideas of one person against the opinions of the many. UserVoice allows users to voice opinions, suggestions, and complaints. The video above demonstrates how it works (it’s difficult to pigeon hole) but think focus groups for companies that can’t afford focus groups, with elements of a forum and even Digg style voting thrown in for good measure.

For companies, UserVoice offers an open and transparent process for customer feedback to any company. The system also allows site owners to ask the community more directed questions (e.g. by a poll) about how users like a new feature or what they think of a specific idea.

I first saw UserVoice when I interviewed Guy King for CushyCMS (post here), King loves the service and although I didn’t video it, he spent 5 minutes showing me how they were using it. It’s always a good sign when people not involved with the company spontaneously evangelize a product. CushyCMS’s UserVoice page here and the official demo page for UserVoice can be viewed here.

The service is completely free during the public beta. UserVoice competes with SalesForce (IdeaExchange) and GetSatisfaction.

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Intuit is joining a crowded field. Salesforce.com has its AppExchange and Force.com. Amazon has its Web services, including SimpleDB. Google just launched its App Engine. And startups like Coghead are also angling for position.

But Intuit already has a lot of small business customers that, in turn, can help it attract developers to its new platform. Bill Lucchini, the general manager of Quickbase tells me:

It is great to have a cool piece of technology, but we have to make sure that developers build successful businesses. Giving them the tools to get in front of our customers is strategy No. 1

He realizes that decent technology is just table stakes. Developers will get access to QuickBase via APIs to use as a foundation for their apps, and they also get hooks into QuickBooks, Intuit’s accounting software that is used by nearly 25 million individuals in 3.6 million businesses in the U.S. alone. Developers will be able to build apps using Adobe Flex and the open-source Eclipse development environment. For the technically-minded, here is a screencast that goes into more details.

Although the economics have yet to be fully worked out, Intuit plans to charge using a utility model similar to Amazon’s that goes up the mnore resources a developer’s app consumes. Says Lucchini:

We are trying to price these things where developers can charge $10 to $20 per user per month and make a profit. Small businesses are pretty price sensitive.

The Web platform wars are in full swing. Which platform will developers flock to for enterprise apps?

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Google is in effect becoming Salesforce’s productivity suite. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentation can be created from within Salesforce’s CRM application. GTalk works as the de facto instant messenger within Salesforce. With one click, sales people who use Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce, where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle. Sales events and marketing campaigns can be overlayed onto a Google Calendar (see screen shot below), as well as colleague’s schedules for figuring out convenient meeting times.

The Google productivity apps are free unless a company wants to upgrade to the premier edition (which includes added security and management features) for $5/user/month. By summer, Salesforce will be reselling the premier edition itself for twice as much—$10/user/month—and will throw in telephone support and put everything on one bill.

Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff tells me that he is embracing Google as another way to undercut Microsoft:

You’ve seen what we have been doing is slowly integrating all of our services with theirs. Certainly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which makes Google my best friend. I have spoken with a lot of customers who want to get off of Microsoft Word.

Of course, Microsoft’s desktop cp-Office apps are threatened long-term by Google Apps, and its own CRM software for small businesses is threatened by Salesforce. But why didn’t Salesforce simply build its own Web-based productivity apps as so many others are doing? Says Benioff:

I really didn’t want to compete against Google in an area they consider core.

Better to gang up against Microsoft together. Now he has the leading Web-based productivity suite baked into Salesforce. But that brings up another question. If Google and Salesforce are so well suited for each other, why doesn’t Google just buy Salesforce? It could accelerate the growth of Google’s enterprise business and make it a little bit less reliant on advertising dollars (since Salesforce charges monthly subscriptions). When I put this notion to Benioff, he punted it back to Google:

You should give them a call and ask them about that.

Something tells me I won’t get a straight answer from them either. But it is obvious that Google is thinking along the same lines when it comes to enterprise apps in the cloud. Just last week, Google launched its own marketplace for enterprise apps, which is similar to Salesforce’s AppExchange. Ultimately, though, how many different Web platform companies can co-exist? A Google-Salesforce combo could sew up the Web platform for enterprise apps.

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Google is calling its exchange the Google Solutions Marketplace. It replaces a simpler Enterprise Solutions Gallery that Google had before. While Google won’t be hosting the apps (it is just a free listings service), companies can create their own product profiles. Customers can search for Google-related enterprise apps all in one place and rate them. Google needs to create momentum around its enterprise products so that smaller companies will want to develop add-ons and create businesses around them. Right now the offerings seem pretty thin. There are a bunch of syncing tools, identity management offerings, add-on gadgets, and integration with other enterprise apps. But what is lacking is an economic model that would really motivate developers to build on top of Google’s Enterprise apps. The free exposure, though, is a start.

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Salesforce will be making a whole bunch of partner announcements at an event in San Francisco next Monday. We’ve been informed that the on-demand enterprise software company will begin reselling Google’s Web-based applications such as Google Docs to its customers. These Web apps will be available within Salesforce.com and tightly integrated into its service.

Such a deal makes a lot of sense. Salesforce customers can already manage their AdWords campaigns from within Salesforce.com, a deal that was announced last summer. Salesforce wants to get as close to Google as it can. And Google wants to sell its apps to enterprise customers (Salesforce has 41,000 of them).

While Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff might be happy to sell Salesforce to Oracle for $75 a share, he might be even happier to sell it to Google. Buying Salesforce would certainly turbocharge Google’s efforts to sell into enterprise accounts.

This integration news doesn’t come entirely out of the blue. Last March, Google Operating System noticed some signs of the coming integration within certain CSS files used by Google Apps. References to Google Apps were also found in Salesforce services.

Salesforce refused to comment on the announcement and we’re still waiting to hear back from Google.

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Bungee Labs

Orem, Utah based Bungee Labs offers Bungee Connect, a web-based Ajax environment for creating interactive web applications. Bungee Connect allows developers to “efficiently create and instantly deliver rich web applications for the small-to-medium business market” by providing an online environment where developers and clients don’t have to install anything. Bungee Connect also automates SOAP and REST based web services. See our February 2008 review of Bungee Connect here.

Bungee Connect competes with DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks.

Total funding to date was not available, with the previous rounds having been raised in August 2005 and November 2006.

(via PEHub)

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Zoho People is a Web-based enterprise app for managing human resources—recruiting, org charts, HR forms, an employee self-service portal. Here are some screenshots and an online demo.

Zoho People is targeted at small businesses with 50 or more employees—companies that cannot afford PeopleSoft, but cannot manage their business on Excel spreadsheets anymore. More directly, Zoho is going after WorkDay (started by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield), Salesforce.com, and smaller online HR apps such as Vemo’s. To get businesses to try it, the software will be free for the beta period. The pricing is yet to be determined, but will probably be in the range of $50/month for HR administrators and $4/month for other employees. It will also be available as part of Zoho’s suite of enterprise apps under blended pricing. Maybe Salesforce should just buy Zoho. Oh yeah, it already tried that.

Zoho People from Raju Vegesna on Vimeo.

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In short, they’re responding to Google Apps and Google Docs, which now account, according to analysts, for up to 2-3% of Google’s total revenue (call it $400m a year, up from $40m a year ago) (note: I can’t find a source for this, but it was quoted to me by a senior Google employee last week). That’s still pennies compared to Microsoft’s $16b or so in annual Office revenue, but the trend is pretty clear – users like free, and they like the ability to collaborate on documents. Today, Google offers what is in many ways a superior product to Office and they don’t charge users for it.

That’s created a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma for Microsoft. And the people up in Redmond are probably smart enough not to simply roll over and die.

The obvious time to do it is at the Mix conference later this week. Where, we hear, Microsoft may also be announcing an offline version of Silverlight to compete with Adobe Air. Would Microsoft release online versions of office via the Silverlight platform? Perhaps… Adobe has their own version, called Buzzword.

In the middle of this sits Salesforce, the king of software on demand. At some point Google or Microsoft will make a serious move to acquire them, and at that point the other will respond with a counter. That at least partially explains why Salesforce continues to be valued by the market at an absurd P/E ratio of over 600 (their continued revenue growth is another reason).

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