Salesforce.com's Social Media Smarts Could Help You

When it comes to social media, Salesforce.com leads rivals like Oracle and SAP — and its success could help your company reach customers. Case in point: Salesforce.com apps now work with social networking services like Twitter and Facebook.

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"The reason we partnered with Salesforce.com is we believe by working with the business community, by working with CIOs and people who run businesses, we can help understand the needs of their users," noted Dave Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager, during an interview with CIO at Facebook's headquarters back in January. "Salesforce.com has really been pushing the limits in delivering software as a service and they have a great cloud computing platform that makes cool apps."

Salesforce.com, for its part, holds a definition of cloud computing that isn't limited to the enterprise-focused software market it competes in along with Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. In many ways, Salesforce.com's strategy seems to include all the moving parts of the Web - search, social networks, instant messaging - as coming together in one unified view for workers.

"It's not only the movement for companies to subscribe to services like ours, but all of them, whether it be Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or Google," Salesforce.com's Swensrud says. "It's about making all these services work together so we can collaborate and communicate."

Beating the Old Guys

The efforts by Salesforce.com's competitors to make their products more social and Web-friendly have either been speculative or half-baked in their conception. Oracle hinted that its newest package of software, called Fusion Applications, would include social networking and "Web 2.0-like" features, but customers will have to wait to see them. Fusion won't hit the market until 2010 at the earliest. In February, SAP launched its "Business Suite 7" software product, in which SAP executives, with a mouth-full of jargon, alluded to "Twitter-like" functionality in parts of the next-generation software suite," but that won't be ready until late 2009.

Analysts say Salesforce.com's competitors have struggled to incorporate consumer Web applications due to their business models and technology foundations. Oracle and SAP garner the majority of their revenue from on-premise software (which customers install on their own servers and computers). Salesforce.com, on the other hand, runs purely on the Web. For customers of Oracle and SAP, this antiquated model presents technological challenges in hooking their on-premise software up to Web-based applications like a Facebook or Twitter.

"It's just generally easier to do with Salesforce.com because [the software] is more open," says the Yankee Group's Kingstone.