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Turning the Guns Towards Redmond - #df10 #e20
It takes stones the size of King Kong to point your guns in the direction of Microsoft, but I believe that is exactly what Salesforce did yesterday when they announced Chatter Freemium.
Of course, Marc Benioff has some big stones. He took on Siebel and kicked their ass pretty good and they, at one point, were the big ape on the block.
A lot of people immediately quipped how this was going to be devestating for Yammer (here, here, here), but really, the real enemy for Salesforce is SharePoint, not Yammer.
First of all, when you choose a competitor, you don't pick the smallest, newest kid on the block, which is what Yammer is. You pick the biggest, baddest mo-fo around, and in the case of collaboration software, it is SharePoint (see Behind the Cloud on how SFDC picks competitors). Not only is SharePoint the biggest and baddest (worst?), but it is also the antithesis of what Salesforce is all about. SharePoint is big, clunky software that is hard to install, expensive to manage, impossible to keep current and no one likes it.
Get it?
Here is the real issue - everyone bitches about adoption of SharePoint. Everyone knows that no one uses it because it is a nightmare. CIO magazine writes:
80 percent of respondents with SharePoint access continue e-mailing documents back and forth, even though SharePoint software was designed to prevent this clunky process.
That is embarassing, but MSFT doesn't care because they either give a huge discount because their customers are on an enterprise license or they promise the world and that it will all be fixed in the next point release.
You know what doesn't have an adoption problem? Salesforce. Most companies say "hey, if you want to get paid, you have to use Salesforce". They say it to the sales team, the marketing team & the support team. It is an easy way to encourage adoption. If your opportunity isn't in Salesforce, you won't get paid on it. If your working a case and you want to get paid, make sure it is in Salesforce. Try that with SharePoint and you'll have a mutiny on your hands.
Added bonus - once you get those teams on board, teams like Finance, who need to see that the deals are there and Product, who need to help with support all fall in line and use the system too.
No adoption problems there. Where you do have a problem is in things like finding people, having a quick conversation, editing a proposal or building a team to work on an RFI. These are all business processes that would have historically happened in SharePoint, but along comes Chatter, which does, per TechCrunch:
- Profiles
- Status Updates
- Real-Time Feeds
- File Sharing
- Groups
- Filters
- Invitations
- Chatter Mobile
- Chatter Desktop
To me, that sounds an awful lot like what SharePoint has done in the past with more social functionality than SP2010 has to offer, plus faster development cycles and a more supportive development channel.
While I'm not predicting the immenent demise of SharePoint, I do believe that SFDC has a great opportunity to strike a massive blow to an important piece of the MSFT picture.
Am I crazy? Is this right on? Let me know your thoughts in the comments and tell me what you think.
What's With All The Chatter?
Enterprise apps get social–and smart. This is more than merely integrating Twitter-like functionality into CRM and creating “social CRM”. This is a rethink and elevation of how information flows around an organization, and where it lives. The elevation of deals to be on the same level as people is significant — in every other social platform, people reign supreme and the world pivots around them. Look for social CRM providers like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and many others to open up their platforms as well.And:
This means your enterprise app will be “adopting” social technologies, moving away from sending notifications via email (and cluttering up your inbox) and instead, sending updates just like everyone else on your team into the news stream. Essentially, your enterprise app will be “tweeting”, with it’s own “profile” and Chatter updates aggregated into one place.This is pretty interesting and something that we've been working on for sometime at Socialtext. On the one hand, SFDC will be a formidable competitor in the market place. On the other, they are still 5 - 8 months from delivering anything in the best of circumstances. Also, there is still a level of acceptance that will need to be overcome. Many of the CIO's that I speak with are still skeptical of having tons of data in the cloud. Salesforce brags that in 2011, 25% of apps will be in the cloud. Simple math, but that means that 3/4 will still be on premise. And let's face it, most sales reps don't use SFDC the way they should so paying $50 a month for a glorified contact management system beats hell out of a seven figure Siebel implementation. It will be interesting to see what kind of acceptance having deal status and team interactions in the cloud will get. From what I've seen, it is cool if a small group is doing it, but when a big enough contingent of employees has conversations in the cloud, it makes everyone nervous. The second question that I have is around the level of integration. They are currently promising a pie in the sky picture of this integration where everything is updating everything, but they haven't explained anything at all about which apps this will work with (outside Salesforce) and what it won't (assuming Oracle) nor have they gone into the security of having certain things shared and others not. Don't get me started on how this will map to a company's archiving policy. Selling social software is hard. I've often said that this is one of the hardest jobs I've ever had. I'm excited about SFDC getting into the market. I love the competition and it will raise the level of customer acceptance to another level. It's another endorsement. And we could all use that. Other posts about Chatter: What do you think? Will Chatter change the way you work, will it be a blip on your radar or will it just be mindless chatter? Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
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