The Rock Band and the CloudThe Rock Band and the Cloud

The big news during CEO Marc Benioff's keynote address was the announcement of a new salesforce "cloud," Chatter.

Last week I was back at Moscone Center in San Francisco for DreamForce, the user group meeting for salesforce.com. Billed as the "Cloud Computing Event of the Year," it was indeed impressive. Nineteen thousand strong filled both Moscone North and South and keynotes and breakout sessions alike were packed to capacity.The big news during CEO Marc Benioff's keynote address was the announcement of a new salesforce "cloud," Chatter. (The existing clouds are Sales, Service and Custom.) Similar to Cisco's announcement the week before of the Enterprise Collaboration Portal, Chatter is described as providing a social computing application and platform environment that allow enterprises to collaborate with business colleagues in real time. When released in January 2010 (months before Cisco will likely announce general availability of ECP), Chatter will be an included feature of any existing salesforce.com licensed application. For enterprise users who want to use Chatter and don't have a CRM desktop, Chatter Edition will be sold at $50 per user per month.

One of the interesting components of Chatter NOT found in the Cisco ECP is the ability for content and applications to join the conversation by talking to users through a feed whenever there is a change in data or status. For example, when a new version of a PowerPoint deck is available, its status can change and anyone who subscribes to the document, similar to a FaceBook "friend," is apprised.

Which brings me to the rock band. During a press lunch, three salesforce.com users gave interesting case studies and then answered questions. One of the speakers was D.A. Wallach, half of the band Chester French. Having played after the morning keynote, Wallach described Chester French's use of salesforce.com. Sounding more like an MBA than a rocker, Wallach explained that 98 percent of all bands fail and that most bands starting out fill venues with their friends, or friends of their friends. So to increase the probability of success, they went about figuring out how to get more friends.

Enter social networking, including My Space, FaceBook and Twitter. But being smart rockers, they also decided they needed a CRM system to manage their growing fan base. The use of a cloud-based application made perfect sense to the on-the-road rockers, who can now maintain personal relationships with a centralized database of fans and check sales activity from anywhere they have an internet connection. With the release of their first album, Chester French found their VIP friends were happy to spend on average $25 for not just a music download, but T-shirts, CDs and vinyl versions of the music.

At last count, Wallach showed 842,449 followers to his Twitter account. This kid may be one of the first to make a million dollars on Twitter.The big news during CEO Marc Benioff's keynote address was the announcement of a new salesforce "cloud," Chatter.