Last week, I had the privilege of attending Cloudforce 2010, one of the major cloud computing events of 2010. The event, hosted by Salesforce, was held at the Royal Festival Hall in London with the support of a number of technology players from the cloud arena including Accenture, Bluewolf, VMWare, CA, BMC and many others.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, declared the arrival of Cloud 2.0 during his keynote address. He talked about the fundamental shift in cloud computing and the need for enterprises to embrace Facebook-like apps as the new paradigm for collaboration in the industry. His question “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” was quite challenging. The “Facebook imperative” is the next in-thing for enterprise software, which rather pushes the data to you than you having to pull it.
Salesforce rolled out Chatter Mobile, the mobile version of its recently announced Enterprise Social Networking application, Chatter, for collaborating on-the-go in the cloud. This tool, tightly infused with the entire salesforce applications, provides employees a platform to communicate with other colleagues.
A demo by salesforce executives showed how closely Chatter resembled Facebook. The profile pages, real-time status updates, groups, and live feeds looked quite familiar and anyone with minimal experience of Facebook can start “Chattering” immediately. One major difference was the instead of following people alone, Chatter allows you to follow data – support cases, Powerpoint slides, third-party systems. This is cool. Chatter seems to be a nice tool for collaborating between colleagues. As Marc said, he can see what’s happening across his organisation no matter where ever he is located. Chatter Mobile is now available for iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry along with the twitter integration which allows users to interact with outer social world. However, the integration with third party client tools is not yet implemented.
Chatter is not without competition. An Indian company Qontext has come up with a similar enterprise social networking tool which is not limited to Salesforce but can act as “a social wrapper around their existing applications – be it SAP, Oracle or even legacy applications”. Socialtext4.0 is another player in social enterprise software offering integration with ERP, CRM and other tools.
But … Is this business social networking leading to an information overload? Do the employees have time from their already packed day to spend time chattering about what they are working on? Where is the thin line that distinguishes between what to put on chatter and what to email? Common-sense has a major role to play here in deciding what an employee should chatter and shouldn’t. As the executives put it, Chatter and Chatter Mobile won’t replace e-mail but yes, this tool can seamlessly share information which would have been quite difficult over email.
If you miss out reading a status update on Facebook it’s not as critical as one on Chatter. Now, when an employee returns from a holiday (without having access to internet for few days), shouldn’t he scroll through Chatter feeds to ensure that he is on the same page with colleagues? This does not save him from yet another painful task of catching up with pending email.
Another thought is that you are not exactly working on Chatter most of the time, instead you are talking about your work on chatter. Yes, it is an amazing tool to get help when a salesman is stuck on getting the right data when talking to a potential client. All he needs is to shout on Chatter for help and hopefully, help will come flying through the clouds in a matter of minutes. But for some others, its not quite easy. As one of the senior officers put it, “one of my employees couldn’t find anything to chatter about.”
Chatter is good for managers and CEOs who can keep a tab on critical cases, deals, issues etc. – in fact its the right tool for micromanagement, if I may put it that way. However, if managers look at Chatter alone as a means of tracking who is working and not working that might be a mistake. What about sincere, hard-working employees who aren’t in for “enterprise social networking” but nevertheless produce results?
We are now at another juncture in the saga of computing. Are the early adopters of Facebook look-alike cloud collaboration in for an advantage or disadvantage? Remember the joke about the tomato millionaire who would have been a cleaner at the Microsoft, if he had an email id? Is Chatter the next killer-app in the enterprise?
This is yet another changing phase in computing where the cloud steps into part two (wow! are we done with Cloud 1.0 so fast?). Some might embrace the change, while others will still be skeptical whether to ride the cloud on Nimbus Two Thousand. But one thing is certain, common-sense has quite a significant role when you have the freedom to chatter, twitter. Lets welcome the world where we will now be Chatter-ing all day along with Twitter-ing and Facebooking.
Abin Varghis
Gins George
Strategicstrata 