Chatter leverages familiar social-networking features from Facebook and Twitter, including profiles, status updates, and real-time feeds. The platform lets enterprises collaborate around documents, but it also lets employees "follow" people, business processes, and application data. The goal is to boost business intelligence by driving real-time insights into programs, projects, people, customers, cases, documents and business data.

"Salesforce Chatter is nothing short of revolutionary for the enterprise," said Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group. "Salesforce Chatter creates an entirely new way to work for employees by opening up lines of communication and ad hoc coordination across every level of an organization. Enterprises can now realize new highs in productivity by harnessing the power of social collaboration."

What is Cloud 2?

Salesforce Chatter is a Cloud 2 application. Much like Web 2.0, Cloud 2 is the next generation of enterprise cloud computing, which is social, mobile and real time. Familiar Cloud 2 applications include Facebook, Google and Twitter. But Chatter is the first Cloud 2 collaboration application for the enterprise.

Farmers Insurance is one of about 100 beta testers for Chatter. The insurer has multiple stakeholders working on different aspects of its marketing strategies -- and Chatter fits the solutions bill, said Mitch Varhula, marketing consultant at Farmers.

"With Salesforce Chatter, the advertising department has increased collaboration across marketing initiatives and improved service levels to our internal customers of more than 14,000 agents," Varhula said. "What's been most amazing about Chatter is how it leverages a secure platform with a trusted sharing model to enable continuous collaboration within the enterprise."

The ISV Opportunity

Salesforce is working to attract partners and developers to create and commercialize innovative apps based on Chatter. The company said Chatter's capabilities make it possible for each of the 160,000-plus custom Force.com applications to become social, real time, and accessible on mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone. As Shimmin sees it, Salesforce is going to be one of the poster children for the Cloud 2 movement. Although Salesforce.com won't make the same market impact as a Microsoft or IBM would in the enterprise space for collaboration, he said Salesforce's recent moves are making way for the company and its partners to build solutions that go beyond CRM.

Salesforce Chatter is included free with all paid user licenses for Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter-only user licenses are available for customers using Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, or Unlimited Edition for $15 per user, per month.