Salesforce.com has announced mobile versions of Chatter, its enterprise social network tool. Chatter Mobile will be available on Apple’s iPhone and iPad as well as Android and BlackBerry devices.
Chatter is salesforce.com’s enterprise social network and real-time collaboration service, offering a Facebook-style stream of status updates, profiles, feeds and comments. Users can pick and choose which colleagues, contacts and projects to follow, which salesforce.com believes is a much better way of keeping up with the most relevant information that using email.
Speaking at the company’s Cloudforce event in London, chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said that in 2009 the number of people using email was overtaken by the number of people using social media – including the 500 million on Facebook and the 145 million registered Twitter users. This means that enterprise software companies must evolve their products to reflect where and how people are sharing information online.
Chatter was launched in beta earlier this year and has been in general availability since June this year. In is now being used by nearly 20,000 organisations, the company said.
The introduction of native apps for mobiles – rather than a browser-based application – means employees out and about will still be able to keep up with their work. Salesforce.com said that the decision to create a mobile app was a simple one to make considering the number of people accessing the Internet through their devices. According to IDC there are now more than 500 million people who access the Internet via a mobile device and the use of mobile apps will grow at a double-digit rate.
"Chatter Mobile means you can know what is happening in your entire enterprise, wherever you are," said Benioff. "The combination of devices like the iPad or the new iPod touch with mobile apps like Chatter that push information to you in real-time are making the desktop obsolete."
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Chatter Mobile for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch is expected to be available later this year with the Android version following in early 2011. It will be available at no additional charge for Salesforce CRM and Force.com subscribers.
