A tired Marc Benioff unveils Salesforce.com Chatter, a collaboration in the cloud service
It was a more subdued Marc Benioff that kicked off Salesforce.com’s Chatter luncheon event today in downtown San Francisco.
And this of course has nothing to do with the fact that there was hardly any new news about the company’s “Facebook for the Enterprise” collaboration service, which was originally unveiled last Fall, at the Dreamforce conference.
More likely, the culprit who sucked off Salesforce.com’s CEO stamina was his arrival late last night from Hawaii (and we all can imagine how tough that can be 
“I’m on a different time-zone and it’s also a smaller room,” joked Benioff who will celebrate Salesforce.com’s 11th birthday on March 8.
Chatter to roll-out mid-year
Despite the lack of new features on Chatter (we’re still waiting for video conferencing), I was impressed to see how Saleforce.com managed to deeply integrate Facebook and Twitter-like features such as profiles and feeds inside its entire stack: from the platform (Force.com) to enterprise custom applications. Making it easy to “chaterrize” any customer applications running on Salesforce.com’s cloud.
“Facebook showed us a smarter way to do business,” told VP of Products Kraig Swensrud to a small audience of customers and press.
Specifically, Swensrud demoed how easy it was to “follow” people, documents, groups, projects and virtually any objects on the Salesforce.com platform.
Google Buzz is no Chatter competitor
When I asked Benioff about Google Buzz, he quickly dismissed it as a competitive threat to Chatter, despite the search engine’s intention to take Buzz to the enterprise.
“We will integrate the 2 systems, and you’ll be able to get your Chatter feed inside Buzz. Chatter is a core messaging architecture layer and you can receive those (feeds) either directly on our own interface or through other interfaces,” explains Benioff.
And on Yammer’s competition? “I’m not familiar with the product, so I don’t know,” he says. What do you think?
Finally, despite lacking his typical punch, the Salesforce co-founder couldn’t help cracking a few jokes on its competitors (Oracle, Microsoft and SAP). My favourite one was Benioff’s tirade on his business alma mater, Oracle.
“When you look at traditional platforms today, we still see a lot of different visions of enterprise software.
We see companies that believe the next generation of computing is all about delivering the next generation of hardware. One of the presentation I did recently is at Oracle Open World – Oracle is a company I have tremendous respect for – but I was a little bit shock that the #1 product they were selling at Oracle Open World was a server. As I went down every escalators, there was another server. Wow, this is really a very different vision. Their vision is more software and more hardware for customers. Our vision is no software and no hardware.
We also see enterprise software companies that continue to work on the complexity of the technology, whether its more application servers or more extensions to existing systems or even continue to work on speed associated with enterprise software. It remains a slow pursuit to deliver the next piece of technology,” says Benioff.
Traditional software platforms are too expensive, complex and slow, argues Marc Benioff
I’m not sure I agree with everything you’ve mentioned, but definitely some good points made.