Analysis: Salesforce.com takes a leaf out of Facebook

Will Salesforce.com's Facebook-inspired social vision win friends and influence people?

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has boldly claimed that his company’s strategy is to attempt to create “the Facebook for the enterprise”. Presumably his vision is based on the popularity of Facebook at its peak rather than the post-IPO Facebook that shareholders are shying away from – but does it make any sense?

At the firm’s premier event, Dreamforce in San Francisco, Benioff openly stated his desire to look at Facebook as a template for an enterprise platform and defended his vision during a Q&A session.

“What we see is that Facebook is the most popular application on the planet. There are a billion people who use it, with more than half of them logging in, which is incredible. I think all software is going to look like Facebook, with the likes of ‘status updates’, and people are going to have to re-write to have a feed-based platform because this is what users have been trained to be productive with,” he said.

Facebook passed the one billion monthly active users milestone on 14 September, while back in June figures showed it had 552 million daily active users on average.

But on the downside, features such as the compulsory “timeline” have proved controversial for the social networking site, as has its IPO, which saw its shares sliding from $38 to $25 in just two months.

Benioff shrugged off any criticism of the social network, which is a customer of Salesforce.com.

“I wouldn’t judge a company based on its IPO. I don’t think you can dismiss a company that has a billion users, half of which logged on today,” he stated.

The Salesforce.com offering that most resembles Facebook is its collaboration tool Chatter.

“Just as Twitter, Yammer, Google+, Facebook and email are all news feeds, so is Chatter, and it’s clear that this application experience becomes a way that people live,” Salesforce.com’s senior vice president Sean Whiteley told Computing.

Analysis: Salesforce.com takes a leaf out of Facebook

Will Salesforce.com's Facebook-inspired social vision win friends and influence people?

Ovum analyst Carter Lusher said that Chatter started life as a tool for creating cohesive employee communities, adding that with the latest version this capability can be extended to customers and partners.

Meanwhile, many of the firm’s customers have welcomed the link between Chatter and Facebook.

“The social engagement found on Facebook, with recommendations for a restaurant being of more value than a Google search, for example, can be applied to Salesforce. If you ‘like’ a document and if people comment on a document, or follow a business opportunity, it is a similar concept. So when you look at the two paradigms – it’s similar concepts of interactions,” said Threadneedle Investment’s head of distribution and corporate systems, Barry Clarke.

But according to Lusher, comparisons between Salesforce.com and Facebook only go so far.

“It is just a convenient way to make people understand what Salesforce is trying to accomplish. They are not directly looking to match what Facebook is doing but rather, taking a broad concept of it and putting it into an enterprise situation,” he explained.

Eventually, Lusher said, Salesforce.com wants to be the company that other people look to for inspiration from its “business is social” concept – the same way that Salesforce.com currently looks at Facebook.

Enlarging on this concept, Benioff said he believes that people will engage in a working environment in the same way they do socially. “Users can collaborate over a business document the same way they do over a photo. Another similarity is that Facebook has a user ID. So does Salesforce, with Salesforce Identity (SI), so that customers can trust us using our identity structure,” he said.

Salesforce Identity is the single sign-on feature, another important aspect of its “Facebook of the enterprise” strategy. Just as Facebook allows users to access different websites with one login, Salesforce wants to create an enterprise parallel with SI that would allow users to sign on to many enterprise or business applications and websites with one set of credentials.

But this is where the cloud computing firm may run into problems as it has to convince end users, customers and other vendors to sign on to SI.

Lusher explained that as Salesforce owns the relationship with its customers, it has permission to suggest how Chatter should work with other Salesforce applications, but it does not have automatic permission to use a single login feature for third-party enterprise applications.

“Salesforce would have to convince other application vendors or web vendors that this is something they should sign on to, which would take a lot of work. But even that is a lot easier than getting other users – not just their customers but non-Salesforce customers – to sign up to SI, which is a much more difficult task,” Lusher said.