Software strategies and more…

Late in 2009 both SalesForce.com and SAP began beta testing social applications that proposed businesses could use social tools within their walls to address a variety of needs from financial management and sales tracking to impromptu group collaboration. Since then both of these solutions have gone live and are beginning to garner much interest in the Enterprise 2.0 communities.

The applications are Chatter and StreamWork, respectively. I blogged about StreamWork before as it occurred how in the business environment we use word processing tools less and less and depend more and more on our email to communicate ideas across departments, teams and amongst individuals.

I have also touched on the incorporation of business intelligence and search (here) and how these could automate the presentation of information in the context of what an individual, team or department is doing at any given time. I talked in my blog about how I saw the trifecta of business intelligence, search and collaboration tools adding previously untapped insight, thus value, to employees in a highly tailored, yet automated way.

Now I am seeing the productization of this in both Chatter (and Chatterbox by Financial Force.com) and StreamWork. Salesforce’s Chatter, “…which has been described by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as a way to make the cloud more collaborative and social.”  adds another dimension to the companies AppExchange so much that the company created ChatterExchange a one stop shop for business grade collaborative tools that can plug-in to the many services and products that businesses are subscribing to from Salesforce.com.

SAP has positioned its self as a thought leader here by doing something completely un-SAP like. By first introducing StreamWork (nee 12Sprints) as a tool to aid in cross organization discussions, decision making and delivery toolkit for organization it took the emerging trends in social collaboration being tackled by the likes of Google Wave and Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and packaged them in context of a business application with integration into business processes.

While there are differences between the products, SAP stays closer to a collaboration tool that connects to popular email, content management and unified communications solutions while Saleforce.com’s Chatter leverages what it has learned from relationships with social media tools like Facebook and twitter. Both address the needs for robust, business grade solutions for collaboration, messaging and workflows. They both advance the enterprise from treating communications as transactional and promote relationships that unleash a community’s ability to work together in real time on topics of interest to bring business and customer value.

The exciting part is both of these tools are open to others to develop on top of and thus create a social network of their own for improvement in a very dynamic fashion. While is is not necessarily new of Salesforce.com, it certainly is not the business norm for SAP.

The potential value for using these applications may be tremendous for their customers who can now stay on top of internal and external events, opportunities and tipping points so that they can participate in conversations that previously they may have not even known were happening. Further by offering social tools in the context of the business they have potentially set their customers up to take advantage of that next big leap in productivity making them more competitive and more agile than other organizations.