Salesforce.com Expands Social Enterprise With Rypple HR Tool, Site.com

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Mark Benioff Thursday made the case that businesses can embrace applications based on social networking programs like Facebook and Twitter, unveiling the latest pieces of his company’s social enterprise platform for performance management, marketing and sales programs.

With more than 5,000 people gathered Thursday at the Cloudforce event, Benioff also brought a stream of speakers from large companies, such as Kimberly-Clark and Hewlett-Packard, to show how Salesforce.com’s social networking programs are being accepted and integrated by enterprises.

While Salesforce.com’s fundamental business remains on-demand CRM, the company is gaining traction with its social enterprise platform, a combination of open cloud, social and mobile technologies that Benioff said is igniting a social revolution in business.

“This is the shift. This social revolution is happening and the enterprise is changing,” Benioff said in his keynote speech. “The social revolution is different than everything we’ve ever seen.”

Salesforce.com at the event released Rypple, a social performance management program that allows companies to evaluate employee performance across social networks. The Web-based system incorporates Facebook features to allow employees to participate in the network by adding comments, badges and other social gaming concepts.

Salesforce.com bought Rypple for an undisclosed amount in December 2001.

“With Rypple, more employees participate in the performance evaluation process and more valuable information is exchanged, Benioff said. “It’s truly about performance, not politics.”

Salesforce.com also released Site.com, a Web-based content management system geared for social enterprise. Users can create content and publish it across a company’s Web sites, providing marketers and other stakeholders with information to use.

Site.com integrates into the company’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, its Force.com custom applications and its database. Site.com features drag-and-drop capability, collaboration with Chatter, Salesforce’s collaboration platform, and template styling to ensure brand experience is consistent across Web sites.

Salesforce.com is leading in the enterprise social networking market, although others are ramping up competition, said Al Hilwa, program director for applications development software for IDC.

“Salesforce.com’s announcements this morning show that this company is increasingly pivoting on a new generation of applications that leverage new social platforms,” Hilwa said in an e-mail to CRN. “The new capabilities in HR, the content management system and the Facebook platform within a platform discussed today show that Salesforce is quickly establishing leadership on the cloud side for such new applications. This is a competitive space, and a few players like IBM and Adobe are pushing such enterprise capabilities to the chief marketing officer.”

Benioff introduced representatives of several large enterprises using Salesforce.com social networking programs.

Ramon Baez, CIO of consumer goods maker Kimberly-Clark, with $21 billion in revenue, said Salesforce.com’s collaboration tools are helping him save money and consolidate business management programs among the company’s 57,000 employees.

“We looked at Salesforce in January 2011,” he said. “There was no way we could have done this if they were not focused on the enterprise. They’ve developed a platform that’s made it easy for business users to use this system.”

John Hinshaw, executive vice president, Global Technology and Business Processes, said HP has started using Salesforce.com programs among a limited number of employees, with plans to greatly expand its use. “We’re glad to be playing with Salesforce,” he said.