At its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this morning, Salesforce.com announced a number of new products in what it called the "social enterprise" and indicated a push toward HTML 5 as its method for delivering mobile applications.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff opened with the "social revolution" behind things such as the use of Facebook in the "Arab Spring." He expected a similar revolution to happen in corporations, with customers and employees wanting similar social abilities. He explored how mobile app usage now leads PC browsers as the main source of Internet traffic and described the "social divide" between individuals and businesses.
To create a social enterprise, companies need a new database with "deep customer profiles," an employee social network, and a customer and product social network.
For creating the customer database, Salesforce's Dan Darcy showed how an upcoming version of Salesforce (known as Winter 12, due this fall) lets users follow their customers on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Database.com, a cloud-based database for storing and accessing information about customers is now ready for shipment.
Benioff also announced a new Data Residency Option (DRO) for Database.com that lets enterprises store sensitive data in a data center, as well as in the Salesforce data center, which may alleviate some of the concerns about data security and compliance.
For the employee social network, Salesforce pushed its Chatter application with new extensions including Chatter Now, which adds presence, chat (instant messaging), and screen sharing features. Other tools include the Chatter Connect API to hook into other systems, like SharePoint, in-line filters, and workflow approvals. Most impressive, a new feature, called Chatter Customer Groups, lets an enterprise allow its customers to securely participate in Chatter conversations.
On mobile, Benioff discussed the new generation of mobile hardware and explained why this is leading the market toward HTML5. He announced a new website, touch.salesforce.com, which will allow any device that supports HTML 5 to access any of the Salesforce applications, or applications built on the company's Force.com platform.
Salesforce's Kraig Swensrud demonstrated this on an iPad, showing things such as sales information, custom objects, and Chatter integration.
While pitched as a model to make the applications work on any device, this in part was also clearly resisting Apple's control of the App Store for the iPhone and iPad. Swensrud also showed it running on other devices, including a number of Android tablets.
Demonstrating a new service called Data.com aimed at salespeople, Swensrud brought together public information from social networks and other public records and then integrated it into Salesforce and Chatter. It seems very useful, though a little creepy.
Benioff addressed extensions to the company's ServiceCloud offering for customer service, including Chatter Service, a way of integrating social feeds into the products. This lets customer service representatives view comments by specific customers on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, and then respond to those posts, either on those sites or the company's own site. Salesforce plans to pilot Chatter Service in the next version, with general availability planned for early next year.
Another keynote planned for tomorrow will focus on the company's development platform, Force.com, and the tools around it.
Benioff said that Heroku is now running Java in addition to Ruby, so the company's platform now works with its proprietary APEX language or other more common choices.
The firm's recently acquired Radian6 service lets a company monitor when people are talking about a company's products on various social networks.
The event attracted 45,000 registered attendees and featured testimonials from Verizon and NBC, MC Hammer, and Neil Young, who talked about how he was using Chatter in an upcoming movie.
Benioff invited on stage Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts to break down how the company created social networks based on the products. Salesforce then showed off the Toyota Friend, a site that keeps track of calls and connects with Chatter, along with a mobile app version.