Salesforce and Social

November 16, 2010

I learned a couple of months ago that Salesforce.com is adding collaborative features to its cloud services for businesses and professionals. The shift is logical. The person who alerted me to this social initiative suggested that Salesforce wanted to become the Facebook for business professionals. I am not sure I can see that playing out in the present line up of Salesforce services. But I can see how collaborative and social tools make sense for a group of professionals working for the same organization or working on on a joint project. IBM has the same idea.

When IBM released Cognos 10, they integrated Lotus Connections into their business intelligence solution to increase sharing and collaboration between users. Now Salesforce is launching a solution to compete with Lotus Connections. According to “Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Mobile Knowledge Management and Collaboration” in the new Chatter “the status of important projects and deals are automatically pushed to you” allowing users to stay in the loop. This new solution sounds promising, but can Salesforce hold out against IBM? In our opinion, the “I” in IBM doesn’t stand for innovation. IBM may have to consider acquiring or partnering with Salesforce in order to augment their current offerings and maximize their solutions for today’s needs.

Will Salesforce and IBM collide? Will IBM acquire Salesforce? Google seems to have let its love affair with Salesforce lie fallow. War or peace? We need a Tolstoy to sort out the high stakes games being played out today.

Laura Amos, November 16, 2010

Freebie

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Enterprise, News, Social, Technology

Comments

4 Responses to “Salesforce and Social”

Luis Benitez on November 16th, 2010 8:45 am

I know SFDC (SalesForceDotCom) and IBM have partnered in the past: http://www.salesforce.com/community/crm-best-practices/it-professionals/integration/desktop-integration/connect-lotus.jsp . I’m interested, however, in knowing more why you think we would have to acquire Salesforce.com? Are you implying that you want us to get into the Social CRM space ?

Right now, Lotus Connections is the market leader in social software platforms worldwide (according to IDC: http://www.idc.com/research/viewdocsynopsis.jsp?containerId=223817&sectionId=null&elementId=null&pageType=SYNOPSIS).
Stephen E. Arnold on November 16th, 2010 5:30 pm

Luis Benitez,

I am delighted you “know” something and trot out a mid tier consulting firm to put the goose under water. IBM buys customers and then fires up its marketing machine. Salesforce is as likely a plum as the fruit IBM has snagged recently. SPSS with your Cognos, anyone?

Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2010
Frustrated Searcher on November 17th, 2010 2:17 pm

Lotus “anything” number one in collaboration. I love it.

I say more vendors should post comments on your site. Cheers up my rather dull non-lotus collaborated life.
Wilbert Youtsey on August 5th, 2011 10:41 am

I can work out what to post manually, read the blog join in and so on, but what should use as the autoposted comments?

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.