Dreamforce 2011 Notes: Salesforce Wants To Be The Collaborative Interface Between You

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While the Metallica concert and guest appearances by MC Hammer and Neil Young during Marc Benioff's opening keynote made Saleforce.com's Dreamforce 2011 entertaining, my principle reason for venturing out to San Francisco was to hear Salesforce's vision for how it was going to turn Chatter into an enterprise-wide collaboration platform. What they showed was an elegant, natural extension of their core value proposition as a CRM and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider. In a nutshell, Salesforce wants you to use Chatter to connect internal business processes to the external social web in which your partners and customers live. This is not a new vision, of course. We've argued the importance of external collaboration for purposes of product management and marketing and even profiled a company that has rolled out technology and changed its corporate culture to embrace intercompany collaboration. What makes Salesforce's story compelling is how it intertwines Chatter with its database, social listening, CRM and PaaS capabilities. Mr. Benioff presented this as a three part story:

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