Aussie Salesforce partners puzzled by Chatter

The talk at Salesforce.com's annual user conference in San Francisco this week has focused on its newly-announced social media and collaboration application, Chatter. But Australian Salesforce partners are finding it difficult to say exactly what it might be used for.

Chatter, which is hosted on the internet along with Salesforce.com's CRM and service software, integrates social media technologies - including Twitter - to provide a live stream of information to the user on events in the business.

Events can be generated by software processes themselves, such as when a tender document is finished or an invoice issued.

The owner of the SaaS-focused services company Sqware Peg, Shawn Stilwell, said there was definitely an opportunity for Chatter, but was not yet sure what it was.

"Are people crying out for corporate Facebook pages? - no, not yet," he said. "But as I read more about it and watched the demo, I saw it could get quite interesting.

"When they started saying that the pages would interact with assets and content within the system, and they started showing updates and messages as part of a thread in a conversation, that's pretty powerful."

Stilwell said there was potential for Chatter to become a new interface for cloud computing, by following in the model of Facebook and Twitter whose user interfaces were widely understood. Business-oriented cloud applications have not matched that level of usability.

"Maybe this is a deeper approach to a user interface that everybody understands, and is more interactive, with more assets within the tool," Stilwell said.

Chief executive officer at the Sydney-based software integrator CustomWare, Robert Castaneda, said the idea of different features of the software sending messages has existed in other tools as activity streams.

"All enterprise platforms are starting to build these features inside them, whether it be (Microsoft's) SharePoint or Salesforce.com, so technically it's not anything revolutionary," Castenada said. "But what Salesforce.com continually does is make these things applicable to the enterprises that they deal with."

Salesforce.com director of platform research Peter Coffee said his company was happy for customers to explore the possibilities of Chatter.

"Developers can take this up and think differently about what they enable people to do," Coffee said. "Now we might have environments where we aren't so focused on creating a fully-defined application, but instead have a dynamic environment of data and actions where people can notice patterns that they weren't necessarily looking for."

Partners heart Salesforce anyway

Stilwell said there has been a surge of interest in cloud computing generally from software consultants and integrators in Australia.

"We are seeing lot of independent operators spawn up," Stilwell said. "When we started there was us and one other (focused on Salesforce.com) - now in Australia there are two premier partners, and three or four smaller operators."

At an APAC reception held at Dreamforce on Wednesday night, Stilwell said he would have seen around 20 independent operators from Australia who are working with the company's Force.com hosted software platform.

"As companies transform more of their business in the cloud, they are going to need more companies like Sqware Peg," Stilwell said, adding that he expected his company of 30 people to expand by 50 percent next year.

While it is unlikely to be Chatter that drives that growth, Stilwell said he expected to see a significant rise in interest in Salesforce.com's service and support application. Large companies that have been Salesforce.com customers were also talking more aggressively about adopting other aspects of cloud computing.