Salesforce presented some impressive figures at its Cloudforce event last week, including customer growth from 47,000 last year to 68,000 this, and record revenue in the third-quarter 2009 as well as predicted revenue for the year of $1.29bn (£790m).

The conference saw the firm's colourful chief executive Mark Benioff give a presentation for almost two and a half hours before hosting a 20-minute chat over lunch with press, analysts and customers, as his supersized burger and chips got cold.

Customer wins

One customer win announced at the conference was with Quintessentially, a concierge service that has deployed Salesforce CRM across 45 countries.

Frank Rejwan, regional chief executive and group COO of Quintessentially said that the Knowledge Bank function would be of most use to the company. This links with Twitter and Facebook by sending, receiving and storing tweets as well as interacting with the Facebook community via a company page.

“We have so many unusual requests from our customers, that being able to use resources from a wider social community and save them into a company knowledge bank will be incredibly valuable,” said Rejwan.

More Chatter

The big announcement from the conference was Chatter, a social network for businesses that resembles consumer sites Twitter and Facebook. It offers live status updates, targeted groups, event and task scheduling.

Never one to understate the significance of his company's products, Beniof said it will “revolutionise all areas of the business” including marketing, service, finance, maintenance, human resources, operations, IT and of course sales - a business area Benioff said was becoming “frighteningly complex”.

Chatter was an anti-climax for some, who argue that rather than replacing other forms of enterprise communication it will become an additional one, making it more fragmented.

The conference follows last month’s announcement of Salesforce partnering with software specialist BMC. The duo will deliver an enterprise-level service desk hosted on the force.com platform and to be made available in spring 2010.

That announcement was made at the Dreamforce 2009 conference in San Francisco in November but many users were still talking about it at the UK-based conference earlier this week.