Chatter, the industry’s first cloud-based enterprise social collaboration application and platform, unleashes the social enterprise and a new way to work for people around the world. In addition, Chatter’s arrival creates a new economy and opportunity for partners and developers to realize commercial success with Cloud 2 apps. Salesforce.com also announced today a new Chatter license for customers to extend the enterprise social network company-wide.

“Salesforce Chatter is the most exciting thing I’ve worked on in my career,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Delivering Chatter is a seminal moment and one that marks the arrival of Cloud 2.”

Salesforce Chatter is a Cloud 2 app, which is social, mobile and real time that employees can use for collaboration across their company. Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook, Google and Twitter, like profiles, status updates and real-time feeds, Chatter empowers enterprises with a new level of productivity only possible in the cloud. Chatter’s s social collaboration technology enables enterprises to collaborate around more than just documents, employees can also follow people, business processes and application data.

Chatter was launched in private beta in February, 2010, to 100 companies with rave reviews and was ultimately expanded to more than 5,000 customers due to overwhelming demand. With Chatter, employees and teams get immediate insight into their company’s programs, projects, people, customers, cases, documents and business data that is pushed to them, delivering new levels of social intelligence.

To find out more about how Chatter and salesforce.com can help your organisation, please contact our UK team on +44 (0)207 965 4690 or our Scandinavia team on +45 333 771 28

salesforce.com have had a Mobile Lite version of their platform available for download for a while now, but this week they have released an update (v4.3) for the iPhone app which now includes enhanced filter and search and comes with the description:

“Find records faster than ever.  The search tab has been enhanced to support both local and remote search to become your one-stop place to find any piece of date.”

This new functionality is a welcome addition to the iPhone app and will further assist users who access salesforce.com on the go.

For iPhone users just tap ‘App Store’ and then ‘Updates’ to download this free update.

If you haven’t already downloaded the mobile lite version (for a range of smart phones) we highly recommend doing so.  Click here for more details on lite.

salesforce.com today announced that South African Tourism, the official customer service host for the world’s largest soccer tournament held every four years, has made social customer service available to more than 300,000 visitors from around the world with Service Cloud 2, salesforce.com’s customer service and support applications. Service Cloud 2 enables South African Tourism to provide real-time, location-based information on the hottest services, accommodations and attractions surrounding the world’s biggest sporting event of the year.

“While it hosts the world’s biggest sporting event of the year, hundreds of thousands of visitors from six continents will descend upon South Africa with millions of questions about where to stay, where to eat, what to do and what to see,” said Alex Dayon, executive vice president of CRM, salesforce.com.

“South African Tourism has embraced the next cloud computing paradigm, Cloud 2, to deliver today’s world-class customer service with modern social features to global visitors in a way that is familiar and intuitive to them so that they can have the best travel experience possible while in South Africa.”

“When the world comes here for the games, we want to create amazing, life-changing experiences,” said William Price, global manager of E-Marketing, South African Tourism. “With travel being a social experience unlike anything else, we want to provide amazing customer service with relevant, real-time, and easy-to-access information that helps people find the best there is to see and do in South Africa. Service Cloud 2 lets us not only leverage social media platforms to engage visitors in a way that is familiar to them, but also quickly reorients our organization and operations to meet that opportunity without the cost and complexity of software.”

To read the press release in full on the salesforce.com website, please click here.

We are of course talking about the annual Cloud Clash tournament, hosted by salesforce.com and set in the beautiful City of Dublin.

Now in it’s third year we have had representatives at each tournament, but this year our hopes were boosted by some young talent.

After spending the day in an outdoor team meeting, the team donned their pale blue strips and left in convey for the late afternoon start.

Our first game looked like it might be our toughest test of the event, but with our strongest team out we kicked off against the bookies favourites, the salesforce.com team.

Play began energetically, with some beautiful football from both sides. Our Goalkeeper Stephen ‘Shilton’ Whitehead made some stunning saves, before the breakthrough we deserved came.

Javed ‘Ronaldo’ Ahmed played a silky through ball to Petra who connected with the ball sweetly for our first goal – which translated as three goals because a girl scored it.

Our defence stayed strong throughout, with strong tackles flying in from Gary Smith and Mark Crosby, which kept the ball away from our goal and helped 2020 to a 3-0 victory at full-time.

Our second game saw the team enter the pitch riding a wave of confidence, with Whitehead in full control at the back, whilst James Batey and our very own French superstar Gatean Barbeu bossed around the midfield, allowing Javed to terrorise the oppositions defence.

Petra made way for Rachel who made life very difficult for the opposition keeper, by darting around the box and drawing defenders away with her.

Javed was the untouchable man of the match, scoring four goals and setting up our fifth. Whilst a late consolation goal was all our opponents could manage.

The hot sun and tiredness were beginning to effect our team and next up were the salesforce.com Managers whose winning reputation goes before them. Again Javed was the star player, whilst rolling substitutions helped the team keep the Managers at bay, with Francis Pindar making some crucial tackles and reinforcing the rapidly fading defence.

The highlight of this game was Whitehead making a run from his own area, skipping past several challenges before burying the ball in the back of the net.

A ‘girl-goal’ was our undoing though, and a weary team left the pitch as 4-2 losers.

Our final match was against the ‘salesforce.com UK & Ireland’ team. A victory here would see us crowned winners of our league and we would then play the winners of the other league in the Final, so in effect this was a semi-final.

Keeper Stephen Whitehead had picked up a nasty injury on his knee during the second match but self-certified himself ‘match-fit’ for the final two matches, despite the obvious pain.

Rachel had to withdraw through injury, so with a depleted squad and injured keeper we took to the pitch knowing that a win against this highly skilled salesforce.com team would see us through to the final.

Two early ‘girl-goals’ in quick succession from salesforce gave our team too much work to do and with this deficit and tired limbs, our valiant team members saw several more goals inch past them into the net.

Even our star players Gaetan and Javed were unable to break through the oncoming tide from salesforce and with hopes fading fast, the referee blew his whistle and ended our chances of lifting the trophy this year.

The 2020 team could hold their heads high with some beautiful football, great teamwork and most importantly, it was all for a great cause – The Homeless World Cup.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the salesforce.com organisers and other partners for such a fantastic time, and for playing the games in such good and fair spirit.

We hope any readers of this will support salesforce.com as they continue to raise money for the Homeless World Cup.

We will be returning to the tournament in 2011 and this time we hope we will go one step further and reach the final. Who knows, we might even be bringing the trophy home with us next year.

At 2020 we’ve been engaging with customers and other cloud enthusiasts for quite some time now through the medium of Twitter. But we now are also thrilled to launch our Facebook Fan Page and YouTube Channel.

Our Fan Page has photos, news, events, articles and the opportunity to ask us your questions. The YouTube channel will include interviews with the 2020 Team, case studies, salesforce.com explanatory videos and film from our charity work.

2020 on YouTube

2020 on Twitter

2020 on Facebook

We look forward to connecting with you!

Formed to enter salesforce.com’s “cloud clash 2” in aid of the homeless worldcup charity, they were set against teams from the legendary salesforce.com 5-a-side teams.

With brave hearts and unfit limbs they trooped onto the pitch and what followed became the stuff of legends. Sadly our heroes are more used to salesforce.com implementation than running around for hours on end (well 20 minutes anyway).

Whilst the team could hold their heads high at the end there was much talk of summer training camps, ice baths, endurance training and physios to aid us next time around. Whilst none of this materialised we do have fresh blood in the squad this year and have re-entered a team for the 2010 tournament and with expectations reasonably low, on Friday 21st May we will run back onto the pitches waving the 2020 flag.

If you are in Dublin or are participating in the event, we look forward to seeing you – and any additions to our cheerleading squad would be most welcome.

Here’s what salesforce.com have to say about Cloud Clash:

‘Cloud Clash 3’, will be a fun mixed soccer event to raise funds for the ‘Irish Homeless World Cup’ team.

Salesforce.com is one of the main fundraisers for the ‘Irish Homeless World Cup’ team with fun events ranging from Rugby Penalty kicking to ‘Strictly come Dancing’ with Marco Nuti. Cloud Clash is our main event and we invite internal, partner and customer teams to join in the fun. The feedback from the first two events has been tremendous, everybody (regardless of soccer skills) had a great time during the events and the party afterwards. The last 2 events have produced the same finalists and winner, the IT/Renewals team. Word on the street has it, that they do anything to hold on to their trophy – but some teams think differently!

The original article from the BBC News website can be found here.

Cloud computing has been an information technology buzzword for many years. Now it is going mainstream.

Bryan Kinsella has a problem. As chief information officer of business services provider Rentokil Initial he looks after a widely dispersed and mobile workforce.

Email is a key management tool but as the company grew it found itself with 40 different email systems across 50 countries for 20,000 employees, with another 15,000 staff offline.

Setting up a new single email system with a global server infrastructure would have meant a massive capital expenditure.

Instead, he settled on a “cloud” solution, rolling out Google’s enterprise email across the company. It’s saving Rentokil about 70% in expenditure, he says, with lower support costs on top of that.

But what is cloud computing? In the simplest of terms, it is IT-as-a-Service. Instead of building your own IT infrastructure to host databases or software, a third party hosts them in its large server farms. Your company has access to its data and software over the internet (which in most IT diagrams is shown as a cloud).

Cloud fans claim five key benefits:

Cheap: your IT provider will host services for multiple companies; sharing complex infrastructure is cost-efficient and you pay only for what you actually use.

Quick: The most basic cloud services work out of the box; for more complex software and database solutions, cloud computing allows you to skip the hardware procurement and capital expenditure phase – it’s perfect for start-ups.

Up-to-date: Most providers constantly update their software offering, adding new features as they become available.

Scaleable: If your business is growing fast or has seasonal spikes, you can go large quickly because cloud systems are built to cope with sharp increases in workload.

Mobile: Cloud services are designed to be used from a distance, so if you have a mobile workforce, your staff will have access to most of your systems on the go.

In other words: information technology becomes a utility, consumed like electricity, water, or even outsourced HR or payroll services, says Chuck Hollis, chief technology officer at information management company EMC. This year, he exhorts companies, “is the year to get your cloud strategy together.”

Bear in mind, cloud computing is not new. Most of us are using the cloud already, through services like Hotmail, Flickr, Blogger and Facebook. It’s business that has been slow in the take-up.

For Bryan Kinsella, the cloud strategy is paying off at an enterprise level. So far his team has moved close to 10,000 staff on to Google’s email services; another 10,000 will have migrated by the end of the year.

“We never went into this to get cost reduction,” says Mr Kinsella. It was about “unifying the business… to operate and collaborate on a global basis.”

Now he is rolling out Google Sites to share documents across Rentokil and create intranets for both the global company and its many divisions.

It’s this easy scaling that makes cloud-computing attractive. Insurance giant Aviva, for example, moved all its enterprise content management and business intelligence tools online, using Microsoft’s Sharepoint online service.

Logistics firm Pall-Ex can grow fast and cheaply by moving much of its IT to UK hosting firm Outsourcery.

Universal Music is using the cloud computing services of e-commerce provider Venda to roll out its online store model across Europe.

“It’s so expensive to build a world-class e-commerce platform, no single retailer can build it by themselves unless they are the size of Amazon,” says James Cronin, chief technology architect at Venda.

Cloud computing can be applied nearly anywhere: the small retailer that needs a secure e-commerce website quickly and cheaply; the ferry operator that has huge computing spikes in May and June while 90% of its IT system idle the rest of the year; the fire service that needs extra computing power to predict the movement of forest fires during the summer.

Cloud services range from fulfilling single business functions, say calculating payroll taxes, to outsourcing heavy-duty computing for complex 3-D modelling.

Many firms “have not moved significantly to cloud computing yet,” acknowledges Casio Dreyfuss at technology consultancy Gartner. But he predicts that “more dynamic” industries, “where business models change very fast, where competition is very hard… will move more quickly.”

Right now, the cloud computing market is worth almost $2.4bn, says Gartner and predicts that by 2013 this will have grown to almost $8.1bn.

Get ready now and map your company’s IT needs, says Mr Hollis. “If IT is your company’s differentiator you may want to keep it in-house.” But most IT is just another service that “can go the same way as other corporate functions like finance, logistics and manufacturing”.

For starters, to be cheap cloud computing tasks need to be standardised. While traditional applications have many little-used features to cope with specialised needs, customising a cloud service costs extra.

For firms on a tight budget this may result in a few standard network solutions. However, it does not mean a standard look and feel. “I challenge you to spot that our customers’ websites run on the same platform,” says James Cronin at Venda. Plus most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers roll-out newly developed features to other customers as well.

Usability is another issue. Some people, firmly wedded to “their” software, whether it’s Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook, are reluctant to switch to plainer online applications. Rentokil’s Bryan Kinsella counters that his migration team received few complaints.

Connectivity is another worry. The City of Los Angeles wants to move 34,000 employees to Google Apps, but there are complaints about speed and reliability – problems that may be rooted more in the city’s internal network than Google’s service.

But what if you go offline? Well, most SaaS providers offer resilient offline solutions. Microsoft – a late-comer to the cloud computing party – likes to point out that it offers proven offline applications like Microsoft Office that integrate with its new suite of online applications.

Security concerns are a much bigger issue. Will your corporate and customers’ data be safe? What about data protection? Can you meet all legal compliance requirements?

“There are enormous security [...] and auditing risks that have not been addressed yet,” says Gartner’s Mr Dreyfuss.

Google’s Dave Girouard says cloud computing has a good track record

“Cloud computing,” warns a top expert for business security, “is the concentration of corporate risk in one single place.”

Not so, say the providers of cloud services. “We put together multiple points of replication… multiple lines of defence… multiple levels of sophistication… that a single company just could not afford,” says Jean-Philippe Courtois, the president of Microsoft International.

His words are echoed by all his competitors. Dave Girouard, the man in charge of Google’s enterprise solutions, says “trust” is the issue customers raise most often when they explore whether cloud computing fits their business needs.

“There are now enough proof-points, enough track record for it to go mainstream,” he says. “Company data are much safer inside Google than in a company’s data centre.”

If Marc Benioff is not the high priest of cloud computing, then he’s certainly its televangelist.

Eleven years ago he founded salesforce.com. Today his “enterprise cloud computing company” is approaching annual revenues of $1.5bn.

Its key product, a cloud service for customer relationship management, is used by organisations ranging from small charities to computer maker Dell.

For years Mr Benioff has been repeating his “no software” mantra, arguing that the old IT and business models of companies like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle are broken.

Cloud computing, he says, is a total revolution of how we use and pay for software, and it is spreading fast.

His company now offers services like Force.com and Vmforce.com that provide developers platforms to build customised cloud services themselves.

Once belittled by rivals, he now revels in the fact that they all compete to prove their cloud computing credentials.

For Marc Benioff, though, one cloud is not enough.

These days he speaks about the transition to “Cloud 2.0″. Just as he once queried why enterprise software was not more like Amazon, he now asks why it is not more like Facebook.

Mr Benioff promises that new software like Salesforce’s new Chatter will do just that.

“We are going through a major shift in computing,” he says, where enterprise computing gets both more social (think collaboration) and mobile (think tablet computers, netbooks and smartphones).

Rentokil may be a case in point. Instant messaging software like “Google Chat has become a very powerful tool for us,” says Mr Kinsella, while using Google’s Android phones has made the enterprise software mobile. His new intranet, meanwhile, is getting a touch of YouTube: “We are using it carefully, but we now send out video messages to all employees, and they have the ability to comment.”

Microsoft’s direction is similar. It’s new Office 2010 software, to be launched next week, makes steps to integrate both “social connections” and online services.

“People are working more and more from everywhere… home and workspace are merging,” says Per-Olof Schroeder at Microsoft’s Office software division.

“The growth of cloud computing is phenomenal,” says Fabio Torlini of hosting company Rackspace. “In the downturn all enterprises are asking ‘what’s safe to put in the cloud, and how can I save in the cloud’.”

And there are other opportunities for growth. As connectivity improves, cloud computing can bring high-end IT services to developing countries.

Right now, says Google’s Dave Girouard, cloud computing is just at the start of its evolution.

“All business computing will be more web-enabled,” predicts Mr Dreyfuss at Gartner. “For some [companies] it will reach the point where it will be totally web centric.”

This would mean more consumers and businesses subscribing to web-based services, such as Google Apps and salesforce.com.  Cloud-based services currently account for around 7.5% of the £8 billion UK software market, according to research company TechMarketView.

But others say cloud computing is hyped and will complement traditional desktop software rather than replace it.

“In the old days, big companies used to generate their own electricity. But they do not do that any more”, said Philip Carnelley, senior analyst at TechMarketView.  ”Software is going the same way – let others do the processing.”

TechMarketView predicts cloud services will be worth around £1.2 billion per year in the UK by 2012.  ”This is not just analysts hyping things up”, says Philip Carnelley, a senior analyst at the company. “It is a genuine shift.”

Cloud computing means that people do not have to invest in powerful computers and software to store their data.  Instead, they can outsource their needs to cloud companies, which charge subscription fees.  But not everyone agrees that cloud computing will replace traditional software which processes data locally.

“The amount of cloud computing is quite small at the moment, so even if it does double that is not such a big deal”, says analyst Laurent Lachal at rival research firm Ovum.  ”The IT industry loves to concentrate on a topic for a few months and then turn against it. There will be a backlash by the end of the year.”

Lachal does not dismiss cloud computing, but he thinks its limitations make it more of an add-on to software.

“It’s becoming a hybrid system – for example you create your work on software on your PC, and then you save it and share it through the cloud.”

Gigaom reports that the offering, which ties the existing Salesforce.com infrastructure to VMware’s SpringSource-based Java platform, is an indication of a larger trend for infrastructure and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers to sell not just a platform, but the app. It’s the difference between selling the services of a general contractor or selling someone a house.

It’s also a highly anticipated move ever since VMware purchased SpringSource last summer and said it would create platform as a service for enterprises. Essentially, what this announcement means is that enterprise customers can use their existing Java experts to build application on the Salesforce.com infrastructure and link it to Force.com and Salesforce.com databases and services.

Under the hood, Salesforce.com is running VMware’s software in its own data centers for the VMforce cloud. It’s the first PaaS offering for VMware, which is continuing its march up the cloud stack, and also shows how influential Salesforce.com can be when it comes to influencing enterprise customers. When asked if VMware would host its Java cloud with any other provider, Mitch Ferguson, senior director of Alliances at VMware, said the company was currently focused on this product.

The VMforce offering will be available in developer preview at some undisclosed time this year, and pricing will be announced at that time. Maybe VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz will announce it when he speaks at our Structure 10 conference in June.

The official news release from VMware reads:

Salesforce.com and VMware Form Strategic Alliance to Launch VMforce™, the World’s First Enterprise Java Cloud

VMforce will provide the trusted, open path to the cloud for 6 million enterprise Java developers, including the 2 million member Spring community VMforce will enable Java developers to instantly tap into Force.com platform services, including the Force.com database, Chatter collaboration, workflow, analytics and search VMforce will include new VMware vCloud technology that dramatically simplifies the management and orchestration of applications on VMware vSphere™ based infrastructure Part of the industry-leading Force.com cloud platform, VMforce will enable Java developers to quickly and easily build next-generation enterprise Cloud 2 apps that are instantly social, mobile, and collaborative

SAN FRANCISCO, April 27, 2010 — Salesforce.com, [NYSE: CRM] the enterprise cloud computing company and VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in cloud infrastructure, today announced a partnership to jointly deliver, sell and support a new enterprise Java cloud called VMforce™. To be announced at an event today in San Francisco hosted by the Chief Executive Officers of the two companies, VMforce will bring together the technologies, expertise and communities of the two leading cloud computing companies driving the tectonic shifts in the information technology industry.

With VMforce, the more than 6 million enterprise Java developers, including the over 2 million developers using the Spring framework backed by the SpringSource division of VMware, will have an open path to cloud computing. Now, CIOs and IT departments will be able to leverage their existing programming skills and investments in Java applications, and take full advantage of the industry-leading Force.com platform to build Cloud 2 enterprise applications that are social and work on any mobile device in real-time. VMforce will dramatically simplify how enterprises and enterprise Java developers can harness the economics of cloud computing without compromising the flexibility, control and choice they require.

“Enterprise Java developers, welcome to Cloud 2,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “This fundamental shift incorporates cloud computing, real-time collaboration and mobile devices like the iPad to meet the new needs of the enterprise. Now, in partnership with VMware, we are delivering VMforce and bringing Java to Force.com so enterprise Java developers can create powerful new innovative Cloud 2 apps.”

“Companies are looking for solutions that deliver the benefits of cloud computing while leveraging existing resources, expertise and infrastructure,” said Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware. “By creating a dramatically simplified solution for modern application development, VMforce is a significant step forward in offering our customers a path that bridges existing internal investments with the resources and flexibility of the cloud.”

VMforce is designed to deliver the first enterprise Java cloud that is:

Trusted: Running on salesforce.com’s trusted global infrastructure, VMforce will inherit the benefits of a service delivery infrastructure that has received some of the most stringent security industry accreditations including ISO 27001, SysTrust and SAS70 Type II. Thousands of the largest companies worldwide are already working with VMware and salesforce.com. Now, with VMforce they can leverage the combined strength of both companies to take their mission critical enterprise apps to the cloud.

Open: VMforce will support standard Java code: plain old Java objects (POJOs), Java Server Pages (JSPs), Java Servlets, and more through the popular Spring Framework. By building enterprise Java apps with Spring, companies will be able to easily port enterprise Java apps onto VMforce or vice versa.

Elastic: With VMforce, applications can scale automatically. VMforce customers will not have to worry about scaling up app servers, databases or infrastructure to meet performance demand. VMforce can handle scalability automatically, as a service.

Complete: VMforce will provide a comprehensive solution for enterprise Java development in the cloud, including the trusted global infrastructure, virtualization platform, orchestration and management technology, relational cloud database, development platform and collaboration services, application run time, development framework, tooling and more.

Cloud 2: Cloud 2 combines next generation mobility, social collaboration and real-time information access, creating new levels of productivity and taking enterprise cloud computing the next level.

VMforce™: The Trusted Cloud for Enterprise Java Developers

VMforce will be the first mission critical deployment environment for enterprise Java apps in the cloud. VMforce will be jointly delivered by salesforce.com and VMware, combining the world’s most popular language, Java, the world’s most popular Java framework, Spring, the leading virtualization platform, VMware vSphere™, and running on the world’s most trusted cloud platform, Force.com. VMforce will be designed to include:

Spring Framework: VMforce will use the Spring Framework, the leading Java development framework which is backed by VMware’s SpringSource division. Spring makes it easy for developers to build powerful enterprise Java apps, increasing development productivity and runtime performance while improving test coverage and application quality. VMforce will also use the SpringSource Tool Suite, an integrated, tested and certified development environment offering the most complete set of Eclipse-based tools for creating Java apps.

SpringSource tc server: VMforce applications will run on the tc Server® runtime, the Enterprise version of Apache Tomcat. tc Server is a wildly popular lightweight application server optimized for virtual and cloud environments.

Force.com Chatter Services: As the world migrates towards Cloud 2 social and mobile applications, developers will be able incorporate collaboration services from Chatter in their applications. These pre-built services include profiles, status updates, groups, feeds, document sharing, the Chatter API and more.

Force.com Development Platform and Services: Since VMforce will run on the Force.com platform, developers have access to pre-built business services that can be configured into their apps without requiring any custom coding. These services include search, identity and security, workflow, reporting and analytics, a robust web services integration API, mobile deployment, and more.

Force.com Database: Developers using VMforce will get the benefits of the proven Force.com relational database, including automatic scalability, high availability, auto-tuning, back up and disaster recovery.

VMware vCloud technology: VMware’s vCloud technology automatically manages the software stack that powers VMforce applications, freeing developers from the cost and complexity of managing hardware and software. VMware’s vCloud technology will onramp the Java application onto the cloud, automate the wiring of the application to the Force.com database, and manage the underlying vSphere virtualization platform.

VMware vSphere™: The industry leading virtualization platform provides the building blocks for VMforce by providing the resource isolation, management, and virtualization for the Java applications.

Force.com Cloud Infrastructure: VMforce will run on salesforce.com’s trusted global cloud computing infrastructure, which handles an average of 250 million transactions daily from more than 72,500 customers for their most important business applications and their most sensitive data.

Date: April 27, 2010

Time: 10:30 a.m. PDT

Location: www.vmforce.com

For more details please visit the VMforce website