The SMB Group has followed (and used!) Dimdim, which has provided innovative, easy to use Web conferencing services in a freemium model with very liberal terms of use, for a couple of years. In January, Salesforce.com acquired Dimdim for $31 million.
Immediately after the acquisition, Salesforce announced that while Dimdim would remain “fully operational during the transition,” it would “no longer be accepting new registrations.” Instead, Salesforce is focusing on bringing Chatter and Dimdim together to provide what it terms “Facebook for the enterprise.”
What’s Next
Last week, we had a follow up briefing with Salesforce’s Mike Micucci, VP Product Management, and Steve Chazin, Senior Director, Product Strategy, to learn more about these plans. Essentially:
- Salesforce will peel off the Dimdim front end and reconstitute Dimdim’s real-time collaboration capabilities into Chatter. This will give Salesforce a way to provide Chatter users with real-time presence capabilities, so users can see who else on their team is online and their status via a button on their Chatter screens, and start “in context” meetings on the fly.
- Salesforce will focus initially on connecting internal team members via Chatter, but over time, will broaden this to connect partners and customers as well, integrating them with its Activa acquisition. (Salesforce acquired Activa, an enterprise chat startup that provides on-demand live chat software for customer service, support and online sales interactions last September).
- The vendor will also explore incorporating audio, screen sharing and video capabilities from Dimdim into Salesforce as well.
While Salesforce is currently deferring to standalone Web conferencing partners (they actually conducted their briefing with us via Citrix GoToMeeting!) in the realm of scheduled meetings, I believe that its only a matter of time before they turn this service on, as users will want it.
Quick Take
With over 1 million registered users, it’s safe to say that Dimdim’s service will be missed by many SMBs–including the SMB Group!
But Salesforce has set its sights on a much bigger picture–one in which it is building, acquiring and integrating the components it needs to become a major player in the collaboration space. As we discuss in Moving Beyond Email: The Era of SMB Online Collaboration Suites, Salesforce’s collaboration strategy is oriented towards social media, real-time activity streams and tight integration with its CRM offering.
The Dimdim acquisition gives Salesforce the ability to aggregate and integrate real-time capabilities across the Salesforce cloud, via a single mechanism, with multi-device access. Combined with its own Chatter platform, and acquisitions of Activa and GroupSwim, which provides collaborative semantic analysis technology (a fancy way of saying that it has technology that allows people to automatically analyzes and tags content with keywords in a collaborative way to make for easier, more relevant searching), Salesforce is stringing together an impressive set of collaboration capabilities.
Salesforce indicates that more than 60,000 companies have already deployed Chatter, and the vendor recently unveiled Chatter Free, a freemium service to entice non-Salesforce customers to the Chatter fold. With viral routes into both installed base and off base customers now in place, look for Salesforce to give the existing collaboration powerhouses–Google, IBM Lotus and Microsoft–an interesting run for the money.