Salesforce.com’s Vision for the Future

At the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco last month, Brett Queener, senior vice president of products at salesforce.com, laid out a vision for the future of sales and marketing that focused heavily on the evolution of cloud computing. In the "Cloud 2" world, social data, social apps, social content, and social platforms will dominate a world of real-time collaboration and productivity. Queener told a packed house of nearly 600 sales and marketing executives that the challenge of the Cloud 2 environment would be to find ways "to stay on top of everything."

To solve that dilemma, salesforce.com has developed Chatter, an internal social-networking platform for sales and marketing teams. Unlike Facebook, however, Chatter will be "private, secure, and trusted," said Queener. Salesforce.com has already used Chatter to generate more than 35,000 status updates, 18,000 wall posts, and 1.3 million collaborative notes among salesforce.com teams. Queener credited the use of Chatter with "breaking down functional silos" by encouraging direct communication between CEOs and various employees.

He then showed how Chatter would work on a smart phone and explained how it would be particularly useful for sales teams, encouraging the growth of "dynamic communities" in which individuals "determine what to share." He predicted that the application will become a vehicle for "uncovering things sales teams wouldn’t have found before."

By asking its partners to develop applications on top of the Chatter platform, salesforce.com has created an ideal situation for integrating more apps into the general CRM environment.