Benioff: Salesforce Chatter And Google Buzz Will Integrate

February 17, 2010

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?

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Video: Google Buzz Adds Twitter Inside Gmail; Competes With Yammer, Chatter

February 9, 2010

Google Buzz is more useful for the enterprise, mobile setting

At a press conference this morning, Google unveiled yet another “real-time” Web initiative: Buzz.

To me, Buzz is nothing else but Twitter integrated to the Gmail user interface, and which gets status updates from your address book contacts.

But who really needs another Twitter-like? Especially after spending lots of time and efforts building, and perhaps monetising, a large number of “followers.”

So my guess is that Buzz will be interesting to try out (I just got mine activated on my Gmail account) but will certainly bore you quickly.

Google Buzz is Twitter for the enterprise, not the consumer

However, I can see how Buzz can be useful for the enterprise, a professional Twitter like Yammer or Saleforce.com’s Chatter.

No wonder Google quickly said it intends to add Buzz to its Google Apps enterprise offering. Something that Google never really talk about when it launches a consumer product.

Even co-founder Sergey Brin highlighted how Buzz improved his own productivity, accelerating the way he communicates with others inside Google.

So, more than a consumer product (who needs yet another Twitter/social network to worry about it), Google Buzz – like Yammer before it – could actually find success inside the enterprise, not outside.

Here’s what Google’s VP of product management Brad Horowitz has to say about Buzz in the enterprise:

And  Buzz’s demo by product manager Todd Jackson:

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