Monday saw two interesting announcements that may very well accelerate enterprise vendor attention and interest in speeding their own social software software development initiatives.
In yesterday's Washington Post article, Joe Weisenthal covers Google's investment in white-label, social network firm "Comrenz" to the tune of $1.0MM USD -- as well as a $5.0MM ante in P2P video technology provider "Xunlei". Why is this important? In one year, Google advanced its local share from 17% to 26% of the total market. Media-rich, social networking offerings will appeal to a user-base already accustomed to similarly dynamic offerings via their mobile devices and virtually all major software vendors have significant stakes in securing a slice of China's market potential. Google's investments demonstrate a belief that social networking capability will offer an advantage.
Another herald, involving Google, also created a riptide in the world of enterprise software. As Erik Schonfeld reported in Seeking Alpha yesterday, Google and Salesforce.com announced the integration of GoogleApps within Salesforce.com's CRM On-Demand application.
The key highlights to the deal are that Salesforce.com's 1-million-plus users will now have direct access to Google's "office productivity sweet" and GoogleApp's 10-million-plus will now have a SaaS CRM alternative with native integration across their GoogleApp document, presentation and spreadsheet tools. The economics of the deal are impressive and, as Erik states, "...Google is in effect becoming Salesforce’s productivity suite."
Some key capabilities the deal delivers to Salesforce.com's subscribers are a native instant messaging application (GTalk) with direct interoperability to their CRM application. "With one click, sales people who use Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce, where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle. Sales events and marketing campaigns can be overlayed onto a Google Calendar (see screen shot below), as well as colleague’s schedules for figuring out convenient meeting times."
The Salesforce.com-Google collaboration delivers another substantial business application with social networking capability embedded "directly within" the business process it manages -- in this case, the "sales force automation (SFA)" process.
Google has long held the watchful eye of the mainstay guard in the enterprise space (i.e., IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle). With headlines this interesting two days into the week, we can be certain the "pinewood derby" for enterprise social software has begun.
Postscript: Six Apart added a nice feature today...
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/124651/an-insight-into-social-networking-and-its-effects-on-21st-century-society
Please can you click on the link and complete the survey for me for my uni project!! Thankyou! x
Posted by: hollie wainwright | April 16, 2009 at 05:59 PM