Salesforce.com Journal on Ulitzer

Salesforce.com is going the way of Facebook and Twitter with a reportedly secure private social networking application called Chatter that companies are supposed to use internally so their people can "collaborate" in real-time, but potentially the techzoid equivalent of the old-fashioned water cooler.

In a statement trying to explain Chatter's aetiology, CEO Marc Benioff said, "Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees? Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me."

The company describes Chatter, which won't be available until sometime next year, as its first enterprise-wide app, "bringing the power of cloud computing to every employee." It's supposed to spring Salesforce out of its sales and marketing ghetto.

It claims enterprise collaboration is almost non-existent because content, apps and people are disconnected and not part of the same conversation. It says content, applications and people will now have profiles - stuff like contact information, area of expertise, work history and a photo - feeds and groups.

Application developers are supposed to build social enterprise applications on the Chatter platform. It will include pre-built social components that developers can add to new or existing native Force.com apps and APIs to push data from any app, including Google Apps, Twitter and Facebook, into Chatter feeds.

Salesforce says all 135,000 of its native Force.com applications will become "instantly social."

Misanthropic companies will be able to restrict who get what out of this torrent of data.

The company says Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. A new Chatter Edition will sell for $50 per user per month and include Salesforce Content and Force.com. Access to Chatter will also available on BlackBerries, Windows Mobile devices and iPhones.

When it released its third-quarter results the other day, Salesforce indicated that it had hired another 160 people bringing its total payroll to around 3,800. That impacts on earnings or will but theen Salesforce has never been profit-driven.

In Q3 it managed to double earnings year-over-year to $21.4 million, or 16 cents a share, on sales up 20% to $331 million. Revenues were better-than-expected and earnings were spot on despite hopes they would be stronger.

Deferred revenue came to $545 million, up 16% year-over-year but down sequentially.

Salesforce added ~4,700 paying customers in the quarter, giving it around 67,900, up 31% year-over-year. The company expects new orders for the year ending January 31 to be flat to slightly up, a slightly brighter outlook than a few months ago.

See http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/ and http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/platform.