Yammer, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise social networks, has announced it has received $17 million in its fourth round of funding, bringing its total financing to $57 million. The Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya, led the round with previous investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners also participating. Palihapitiya will have an observer's seat on Yammer's board of directors.

Yammer has grown at a rapid pace. It has been adopted by over 100,000 businesses in 160 countries in less than three years, including employees at more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Major corporations such as 7-11, Ford, Southern Company, Shell and SuperValu have deployed Yammer this year, proof that enterprise social networking is entering the mainstream.

• Chatter Will Be Available to Workday Users, Making Nearly 2 Million Workers More Collaborative Across the Enterprise
• Custom Apps With Workday Data Feeds Can Be Built Quickly and Easily on Force.com
• Dreamforce to Showcase How Businesses Can Tap Into the Power of Social, Mobile and Open Technologies to Become Social Enterprises

Cloud computing companies salesforce.com  and Workday, Inc. have announced they will join forces to deliver workforce data to the social enterprise. Workday will deliver two new offerings that will extend data from Workday through salesforce.com's social, mobile and open technologies. The first will enable Workday data to be integrated into Salesforce Chatter -- salesforce.com's secure, private social network for businesses -- to securely share, collaborate and act upon workforce data in real-time. The other will allow customers to create custom applications with Workday data feeds on Force.com, salesforce.com's enterprise platform for building and running employee facing social apps.

Through the partnership, Workday will deliver:

• Salesforce Chatter and Workday Integration: Workday customers will be able to use Salesforce Chatter to securely share and take action on worker data that resides natively within Workday. This packaged integration pushes traditional Workday business processes, such as approval requests, into a real-time social stream. It also allows real-time enterprise-wide collaboration on topics that cross traditional departmental barriers, such as sales cycles, personnel, payroll, budgeting and spend on company initiatives.
• Custom Force.com App Leveraging Workday Data: Workday customers, partners and developers will be able to securely pull workforce data residing within their Workday application into Force.com to build custom apps.

Pricing and Availability

This week Netsuite announced a new integration between Yammer and NetSuite that allows mission-critical data to be socialized within the enterprise. The new joint product demonstration showed how activities taking place in a system of record such as NetSuite – finance users generating invoices, product shipment fulfillment, and sales reps placing orders – can be "socialized" and transmitted as an "activity stream" to Yammer's enterprise social networking platform. This integration marks the debut of Yammer Activity Streams, which are intended to aggregate activity stories across a wide variety of enterprise applications. By importing content from NetSuite, Yammer Activity Streams can provide users with an instant snapshot of NetSuite activity inside Yammer, where they can easily share and discuss with colleagues.

• Acquisition will extend salesforce.com's Chatter collaboration platform with critical real-time communication technologies
• Follows the proven Facebook model of combining real-time collaboration and communication into a single integrated service
• Enables salesforce.com to build on momentum of 60,000 Chatter customers, accelerating the industry shift to Cloud 2

Founded in 2007, Dimdim has created critical real-time communication technologies such as presence, messaging and screen sharing. With the acquisition, salesforce.com gains Dimdim's real-time communication technologies, along with a team of world-class developers experienced in building cloud-based collaboration services. Salesforce.com will use the acquisition to bring new real-time communication capabilities to the Chatter collaboration platform, mirroring the proven Facebook model of combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service.

Comments on the News

"Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world's most popular Internet site."

 

When Salesforce.com bought crowdsourced business contact database Jigsaw for $142 million earlier this year, the CRM giant said that it would combine its suite of applications with Jigsaw’s model for the automation of acquiring and keeping up-to-date business contact data. Today, Salesforce is unveiling Jigsaw’s deep integration into the company’s platform, Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM.

Jigsaw will now deliver real-time updates to contact and company information within Salesforce CRM through communication platform Salesforce Chatter. Jigsaw, which uses a Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model to bring in data around business contacts, has been incorporated into CRM applications to provide on-demand data, and analytics on the health of data and on usage.

With Zuora + Salesforce’s Chatter, companies selling subscription services can now chatter across their sales, support, sales operations, finance, legal and accounting teams.

Zuora Delivers Z-Force 3.0 with July ’10 Including New Quoting Features, 10x Performance Improvements and Support for salesforce.com Chatter

100 percent native Force.com application illustrates the power of two leading cloud platforms – salesforce.com and Zuora—for subscription-based businesses

Z-Force 3.0 Enables Collaboration, Performance and New Features

Originally posted on CrunchBase.

Editor's note: This guest post is written by  Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. In it, he explains why enterprise software should take its cues from  Facebook and become more social.I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn't stop thinking about a simple question: ?Why isn?t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?? Why couldn?t applications be run from a simple website, without software or hardware to install, and pricy consultants to hire? Why couldn?t we just compute in the Internet, or the cloud, and get away from the data center and all its complexity. Simply put, I wanted to simplify the enterprise. It was a pretty straight-forward idea, but from the confines in which I sat, there wasn?t anything close to a straight-forward solution.That vision led to the founding of salesforce.com. But the enterprise world wasn?t ready for Amazon.com, or eBay, or Yahoo, or any of the innovative services that were changing the way consumers bought, sold, or communicated. I tell this story in my book  Behind the Cloud and can?t help but note that the factors at play 10 years ago?an inspiring service, wide skepticism, and phenomenal potential?mirror where we are today. But it?s no longer Amazon that frames the questions or gives us the answers.In this decade, I?ve become obsessed with a new simple question: ?Why isn?t all enterprise software like Facebook?? As we were focused on bringing enterprise computing into the modern age, Facebook redefined the values of consumer computing and helped ignite the social phenomenon. The compelling aspect of feeds, profiles, and groups, amplify the service?s stickiness. So does its functionality on a mobile device like an iphone?necessary to secure a service?s status as a ?killer app.? Facebook is where I start my day to find out what my friends and family are doing. It?s where I go to see the important events in my social life. Everything I care about and need to know is pushed to me?and it requires no work on my part.What does the social revolution mean for business, though? So far it hasn?t meant much. Currently, our methods of collaboration are defined by Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint, but these tools haven?t kept up with the changing times. They were conceived before anyone knew what a ?newsfeed? was. (In fact, Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg was!) Today, realtime information is possible, which has changed everything: How people consume information has changed, how people learn things about each other has changed, and how people stay current has changed. Most of all, our expectations around immediacy have changed.Now, we need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone?s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet.New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration. Now in beta,  Salesforce Chatter takes the best of Facebook, Twitter, and other social leaders, for instance, and applies it to enterprise collaboration?making people more productive and businesses more competitive. I already see it working: I have an enterprise desktop where without any effort I can learn about what my team is focusing on, how my projects are progressing, and what deals are closing. It is fundamentally changing the way our organization collaborates on product development, customer acquisition, and content creation?making it all easier than ever before.We are on the precipice of a major shift in our industry. It stems from a change we badly needed and the once-in-a-decade question we had to ask. And this time, we are all ready for the answers. Luckily, this time, I don?t have to leave my job to find out what they are.

Read the original article by Marc Benioff here at CrunchBase

This week Saleforce took the wraps off the Chatter pilot program. After several months of testing with select customers, it is going into production for this group. We reviewed Chatter with SalesForce's VP of Corporate Strategy, Bruce Francis and SVP Product Marketing, Kraig Swensrud to find out what all the excitement was about.

Chatter has the goal of bringing the best of the social media tools to the enterprise, making enterprise sales as easy to use as Facebook or Twitter. With all of the buzz around privacy and social networking tools, it's refreshing to hear that these tools use a the same security models that the rest of SalesForce has built in to its platform.

Chatter is a new module in the SalesForce architecture that takes advantage of the existing APIs and services, while providing rich collaboration features. "Collaboration as a Service" is now trending as a new category in the industry.

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