There aren’t many ways to alleviate that concern, but cloud companies, whether service providers like Amazon Web Services or application providers like Salesforce.com, have a pretty strong motivation to do everything they can to lock down their systems and prevent intrusions. And yet the concerns linger.

CipherCloud is a start-up that has come up with an interesting solution to the problem, which comes down to this: Its customers place a secure gateway — it’s a virtual appliance that runs on the customer’s own on-premise hardware — that encrypts data that gets placed in the cloud. It works with several widely used cloud services as well, including Amazon, Salesforce.com’s Chatter and Force.com, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Office 365. It has 40 enterprise customers and 1.2 million end users.

The company said today that it has secured $30 million in VC funding in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Also investing in the round are Index Ventures and T-Systems, the venture capital arm of the German telecommunications concern Deutsche Telekom. AH had previously been among CipherCloud’s seed investors.

John M. Jack, a newly named board partner at AH, will join CipherCloud’s board. Jack is the former CEO of Fortify Software, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2010. Before that, he was CEO at Covalent, which in 2008 was acquired by SpringSource, which was itself ultimately acquired by VMware in 2009. And before that, he was COO at Vantive, which was acquired by PeopleSoft in 1999, and is now part of Oracle.

Jack said one of the things that impressed him and the team at AH was the fact that users never really know their data is being encrypted as it comes and goes from the cloud applications. “They use their applications as they normally would with no impact to them,” he said. “Rarely do you see a company like CipherCloud that’s taking advantage of such a huge market opportunity.”

CipherCloud was started by Pravin Kothari, a founder of ArcSight, a security company acquired by HP in 2010 for $1.5 billion. He said one key trick that CipherCloud has up its sleeve is that in the act of carrying out the encryption, that application up in the cloud doesn’t break. Sometimes encryption will break the application, because it messes up the formatting of the data that the application is expecting, and also interferes with the ability to carry out basic things that users want to do on their cloud data, like searching. “We have some patents pending on ways to encrypt the data while preserving the formatting, and without interfering with searching and other tasks that users typically do,” Kothari told me.

The end result is that companies can get the benefit of shifting to cloud applications — which brings with it a lot of cost savings — without having to worry as much about data security. Cloud providers themselves can’t see the data, because the customer remains in control of their encryption keys.

The company can’t name any customers — security companies never do — but its customers include two of the five biggest banks. It has customers in eight countries and 10 different vertical industries.

CipherCloud is, by my count, AH’s third security investment. Founder Marc Andreessen hinted at the firm’s pivot toward security investments in an appearance at D: All Things Digital in 2011. Days later, it made an investment in Silver Tail Systems, which has since been acquired by EMC . Its other security investment is Bromium.

Now Yammer is not only part of SharePoint, but a part of all the company’s mainstream business apps. At a SharePoint-oriented conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced today that the kind of social features that Yammer provides — and which SharePoint was widely criticized for not having, or at least for not having executed well — are now just part of every business application. For openers, Yammer has been integrated into Office 365 Enterprise and with SharePoint Online.

Also gone from Yammer is the four-tiered pricing model that at once made it so successful and yet ultimately was said to have doomed its long-term viability as a business. Yammer had picked up a lot of its momentum by being free for companies to use indefinitely, but it was supposedly a lot more powerful if you got one of the paid versions. The problem was that the free version was usually good enough, and few cared enough to try the paid version. The result: Converting free customers to paid customers was pretty tough.

Microsoft has sought to fix that by cutting the number of versions to two — one free, called Yammer Basic, that will be the simple, standalone version. On the other, Yammer Enterprise, Microsoft has slashed the price from $15 a user to $3 a user.

It’s all part of a broader “social everywhere” strategy that will in time see social features crop up everywhere you see a Microsoft logo: Office, Outlook, Skype. Everything that happens at the office that involves another person becomes an event that shows up in the social feed.

As Microsoft corporate VP Jeff Teper was quoted in the big announcement today: “We envision a world in which social is woven into the apps you use every day — where people work together using new experiences that combine the power of social with collaboration, email and unified communications.”

If you’ve got a few hours, you can watch the action in today’s keynote here.

Chatterbox: This is the offering that Benioff telegraphed last week, and which raised so many eyebrows. Salesforce calls it the “Dropbox for the Enterprise,” laying aside the fact that one called Box already exists. Anyway, the point is to “manage and share files in the context of business,” as the press release says. Once you get employees collaborating via social tools, they’re going to want to share files they can work on together within that context. Box, in which Salesforce is an investor, is one target, as is Dropbox. But so is Microsoft’s SharePoint.

Salesforce Identity: Once you get into the business of integrating a bunch of cloud services into one place, you need to manage all the sign-on credentials involved. This is the reason that the start-up Okta exists. Salesforce is essentially aiming to compete with Okta.

Work.com: Remember when cloud-based human resource and talent-management software companies were being acquired at a rapid pace, in part because of the rise of Workday? Salesforce got into the act, too, by acquiring a tiny HR cloud player called Rypple. Work.com is its new name.

Salesforce Touch: One of the earliest companies to see the potential for Apple’s iPad as a tool for use in the enterprise was Salesforce.com. It had early versions of its core customer-relationship management applications in the App Store, and has since expanded its reach to Android and other platforms. Today, it’s kicking that commitment to mobile up a notch. Salesforce Touch uses HTML5, allowing it to work easily on iOS and Android tablets and phones; it is optimized for touch interface. The point is to make Salesforce easy to get at when on the go — and sales people always are on the go — so they can take advantage of just a few minutes of downtime and get things done from a mobile device.

Chatter Communities for Partners: There are a lot of reasons why a company might want to build a social community. The classic example I can think of is a videogame company that wants to support people working their way through the levels of a tough game. But you might want to set up a social network of vendors you buy from, or distributors who resell your products, or third parties who support what you sell. The idea is to make creating that community easy and full-featured from the start, so there’s not so much expense and effort involved. It’s built on Chatter, which is Salesforce’s enterprise social and collaboration platform.

Data.com Social Key: It’s one thing to ask a sales lead what he thinks about something, but quite another to keep track of what he or she tweets or blogs about on that same topic, and often it can yield some insight to help close a deal. Up to now, Data.com has been Salesforce’s go-to offering for background intelligence on sales leads, combining things like Dun & Bradstreet profiles with contact information from Jigsaw. Social Key brings information gleaned from Twitter and blogs and YouTube videos into the mix.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Salesforce’s two biggest acquisitions in recent memory are Buddy Media and Radian6. With the Marketing Cloud, Salesforce aims to combine the strengths of the two, to draw together disparate strings of conversations with customers via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and online communities. It also helps create and manage marketing campaigns within those communities, and helps to track the results of those efforts.

Heroku Enterprise for Java: Oracle’s Java is the most widely used programming language in use in the Enterprise. Today, Heroku, the cloud-based software-development service that Salesforce acquired in 2010 , is for the first time embracing the community of Java developers. Getting a Java app built means assembling a bunch of different tools piecemeal from different sources. The new Java service gets software developers fully ready to get right to work with a single click, which saves a lot of time and effort, and thus reduces the cost of development. One other feature sure to be popular with the developers is integration with Atlassian, a collaboration tool that is geared toward the needs of programmers.

It’s worth nothing that Salesforce shares have been trading up considerably in the last month or so, in part because of the anticipation of Dreamforce, but also on Salesforce’s strong results. Today, the shares are up by $1.09, to $157.38, which amounts to a 61 percent increase this year to date. Say what you will about the Salesforce Kool-Aid, its shareholders like the taste.

There’s another drama playing out ahead of Benioff’s keynote, concerning what he may or may not say about a series of features and services called Chatterbox that Salesforce is launching. Last week, Benioff surprised a lot of people by declaring at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he was gearing up to launch services that would compete with Box, the enterprise cloud file-sharing and collaboration service, and also with Okta, a cloud identity-management service.

Aaron Levie, Box’s CEO, said he had seen the service coming for a few months now, and that it was, in a sense, inevitable. Salesforce’s Chatter social enterprise service would in time need a robust file-sharing capability built into it, anyway.

Since then, I’ve checked in with Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta. His reaction was pretty close to that of Levie’s. He has known that it was coming for awhile, and Salesforce had to do it anyway. “Salesforce is realizing that, with the cloud and a mobile work force, managing the identity layer is a key part of it,” McKinnon told me Monday. “They finally woke up to it. It’s a little unnerving when someone as big as Salesforce gets into your space, but it makes it clear to our customers and partners that this is a big deal we’re working on, so in that sense, it’s a big validation.”

With so many companies adopting cloud services and creating accounts for employees on all of them, McKinnon left Salesforce, where he had headed up its engineering efforts, to start Okta. The service gathers up all those cloud account credentials and passwords and creates a single sign-on for all of them, making them easy to manage. Salesforce.com is one of the 1,351 services it works with. Others include Box, Google Apps, NetSuite, Workday and Microsoft’s Windows Azure.

McKinnon takes some encouragement from the data he sees courtesy of his own service. Offering a service for unified sign-ons makes Okta sort of a barometer for the cloud ecosystem, he says. Chatter, Salesforce’s social service, is more or less central to Salesforce’s efforts to unify its many offerings, and is the company’s answer to services like Jive and Yammer that have sought to make the process of collaborating within a company a little more akin to using Facebook.

Salesforce’s promotion of Chatter helped Jive and Yammer seem more legitimate. “Salesforce put all this money and effort behind Chatter, but it didn’t kill Yammer or Jive, it only accelerated their business,” McKinnon said. Jive IPO’d last year, and Yammer was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion over the summer. “Once Salesforce comes out with its identity management product, I think more people will look at us.”

So, how much of a competitive threat does McKinnon see from Salesforce? Some, but announcements aren’t products. And there’s the rub. Salesforce, McKinnon says, has a habit of making big announcements from the stage at Dreamforce, and then not following up, or at least not following up to the extent that the pronouncements from the keynote stage would seem to imply. “Salesforce is in many ways a marketing-driven company,” he says. “We’ll have to see how they execute. The real proof will be in how they follow up this Dreamforce announcement.”

The idea is to let companies create their own environments where they share information internally and with partners and customers of their choosing. Exposing business processes to the kind of social flows that we’ve become accustomed to on Facebook and Twitter allows vendors and customers to participate in discussions more readily. As Salesforce puts it, this amounts to “breaking down the boundaries of the business.”

Most products that bring companies into the same place with the other entities they do business with are focused purely on the conversation, or on getting transactions done. Communities, Salesforce says, will let them do a lot more.

Deploy communities to support any business process — from franchises sharing best practices, to high-end retailers delivering custom shopping experiences, to universities looking to connect students with alumni.

If it sounds a lot like Chatter, it should, though that brand name appears almost nowhere in the announcement. It’s being run by Doug Bewsher, Salesforce’s SVP for Chatter. But the fact is that Chatter isn’t quite getting the traction that companies like Jive and Yammer are getting.

Salesforce’s news happened to drop on the same day as word of a major upgrade from Yammer, which is in the process of being absorbed into Microsoft. The software giant said in June that it would pay $1.26 billion for Yammer.

Among the new features is an in-box that gives the user a quick glance at new messages meant for their eyes, including mentions, group messages they’re included in and private messages. Another is a homepage view that, at a glance, gives you a look at what people in your company are buzzing about and what files are being actively shared.

There’s also a “presence” feature that indicates when someone is online at that moment, so you can start a conversation with them; you can easily add more users to the conversation as needed.

As you may remember, Yammer and Salesforce have a history of being rivals. Last year, Yammer launched a promotional campaign called “Friends with Benefits” that touted the fact that Yammer integrated data from Chatter, though they acted more like Frenemies.

No one authorized to speak for Yammer is talking about this. I will say that a lunch meeting I had scheduled on Tuesday in New York with Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni was suddenly canceled because of what I was told was a “personal emergency.” It could be coincidence, but then again it might not be.

Another bit of color I’ve heard — and again it may not mean anything — is that Yammer CEO David Sacks has invitations out for a big 40th-birthday bash in Southern California this weekend, at which rapper Snoop Dogg is expected to perform. Whether or not Sacks will be celebrating the sale of his company is still uncertain, but there’s a lot about the speculative story in Bloomberg — which cites two people familiar with the talks — that makes sense.

Outwardly, Yammer has looked to be the most promising of the social enterprise software players that are not named Jive. In February, it raised $85 million in a fifth round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, at an implied valuation of about $1 billion. Meritech Capital Partners, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group and Khosla Ventures also participated in that round. Prior investors include Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners, and the angel investors are Bill Lee, Max Levchin and the football great Ronnie Lott.

That round of funding came on the heels of the late-2011 IPO of rival Jive, whose market capitalization as of Wednesday’s close was $1.03 billion. Lots of people got rich in that offering, especially founders Bill Lynch and Matthew Tucker, and CEO Tony Zingale.

Jive had followed a fairly specific path to going public, which Yammer could have followed, but hasn’t. For example: Before raising a $30 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins in the summer of 2010, Jive had tapped Zingale, the veteran CEO of Mercury Interactive, who saw that company through its $4.5 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard.

Later, in early 2011, Jive added directors with public company experience to its board; then it set about making some important acquisitions, among them Proximal Labs, an “acqhire” deal; and then OfficSync, a deal that gave it crucial plug-in technology for Microsoft Office.

Yammer has done nothing like this, with one exception: Its April acquisition of the British start-up OneDrum looked an awful lot like Jive’s acquisition of OfficSync. Otherwise, there have been none of the classic pre-IPO signals from Yammer: No high-profile additions to the board, no more acquisitions, no chatter about bankers competing to lead it through the S1 filing and road-show process. When asked about his interest in doing an IPO, Sacks would, in conversations with me, tend to simply avoid the subject. A billion-dollar exit now would seem mighty attractive to Sacks and Yammer’s investors, rather than the uncertainty of an IPO in a shaky market, coupled with a head-to-head-to-head competitive slugfest with Jive and Salesforce.

Then there’s the simple matter of business challenges. Yammer is, by all accounts and its own publicly disclosed stats, having trouble converting its free users to paid status. It is quick to brag about its four million corporate users, but they’re fuzzy numbers. Many start using the service for free, experiment with it, but never turn out to be regular, daily users. Fewer still ever convert to paid status. Yammer has said in the past that its conversion rate is about 20 percent, which works out to about 800,000 paid seats. Getting companies to pony up has proven difficult. Jive doesn’t disclose the total number of seats, but it does disclose how many companies are customers: 676 as of March 31, all of them paying subscribers.

If Microsoft proves to be the buyer, then it would give the Windows and Office giant a key piece of technology to offer its enterprise customers. One big argument for the existence of the social enterprise software business is to attack Microsoft’s outdated collaboration software, SharePoint.

The players are many: Aside from Jive and Yammer, there’s Salesforce.com’s Chatter service, which tends to be strong in sales departments where the mainline CRM service is already in use. Other players include Socialcast, owned by VMware; Moxie Software and Atlassian’s HipChat are others.

Once Microsoft gets its hands on it, two things will be true: Yammer, which is generally seen as still being buggy and in need of a lot of smoothing out of its rougher edges, will need some serious investment. The problem is that, even at a $1 billion valuation, Yammer is small enough that it will disappear inside Microsoft.

The other is that the freemium business model will have to go away. With the possible exception of Skype, it’s just not in Microsoft’s DNA to offer an enterprise product for free and leave it to the users to upgrade to the paid version when it suits them. When the rubber meets the road, many customers may dump Yammer in favor of something else. Those who are serious and willing to pay will consider Jive, which would probably capitalize on the opportunity by offering special deals to customers who switch. Those who demand free will switch to something they can still get for free.

We’ll see if this deal materializes. Bloomberg said a deal could be announced as early as today.

One of the things the company signaled it was going to do with that money was make acquisitions. Today it announced its first: OneDrum, a British start-up that specializes in making Microsoft Office a lot more collaborative.

Financial terms aren’t being disclosed, and OneDrum is a pretty early-stage company with 10 employees and combined $2 million in capital raised, mainly from angels and Amadeus Capital Partners, a British VC firm. But, the deal is invariably going to be compared to a similar one announced last year by Yammer rival Jive for OfficSync.

I talked to Yammer CEO David Sacks about the deal earlier today and I asked him about the comparison. He said that one thing OneDrum does that OfficSync does not is a level of desktop synchronization that’s comparable in some ways with what you find with something like DropBox. And, it does so without the need for a plugin that might, he argues, mess up how Office runs and which can be difficult to deploy across an enterprise.

Basically, Yammer customers will be able to share and see the contents of the folders they share with other people via Yammer. Also, people can collaborate on Office documents live. Changes are tracked within the Yammer news feed and revisions are stored. Once you drag a document into your Yammer folders, the contents are instantly text searchable from within Yammer.

What OneDrum lacked, Sacks told me, was “a good front end to express the OneDrum technology,” which Yammer will readily provide.

Today, Atlassian will announce that it has acquired HipChat, a maker of a specialized private instant messaging and chat platform aimed at companies. Financial terms are not being disclosed. But it’s pretty apparent the two were made for each other. HipChat has some 1,200 customers, including Groupon, HubSpot and Wired. The plan is pretty simple: Atlassian will incorporate HipChat into its own software. There’s probably a good bit of overlap between them.

HipChat’s three founders — Pete Curley, Garret Heaton and Chris Rivers — are all joining Atlassian. Their history, as described on their Web site, is pretty basic: “We created HipCal. Plaxo liked it so we went to work for them. We created Plaxo Pulse. Comcast liked it, so we went to work for them. HipChat is our current baby.” Now add: “Atlassian liked it, so we went to work for them.”

I talked briefly with Atlassian president Jay Simon yesterday. “None of our tools has a real-time component,” he told me. “They’re all asynchronous. HipChat is going to give us that.”

People often flock to the basic tools, like AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, when they need something instant. HipChat does the instant messaging part, but it also has features like chat rooms that remain persistent, which means they don’t blink out of existence when people using them leave. Files can be shared easily, and APIs from other platforms are supported. It’s also secure.

Consider Atlassian a variant on the social enterprise and collaboration trend that’s been rocking the enterprise in recent years, with the appearance of companies like Jive Software, Yammer, Saleforce.com’s Chatter and VMWare’s Socialcast, to name a few. Atlassian’s tools (its main one is called Jira) allow teams of software developers to work together, keep track of what each member of a team is doing, squash bugs and do whatever else it is they need to do. And among its 20,000-odd customers are the kind of companies you’d want to be doing business with: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Adobe, LinkedIn and Cisco Systems. Pay attention now, because someone is going to buy this company.

The move is the latest by Yammer to integrate with other third-party software. Last year, Yammer raised eyebrows a bit by integrating Salesforce.com’s competing Chatter social enterprise service into its own software. Later, it integrated Box.net and a batch of other services, like Microsoft SharePoint and NetSuite.

Yammer didn’t work directly with SAP on the integration but instead turned to an SAP developer called Freeborders to build a plugin that companies using SAP can install into Yammer. They call it the Yammer SAP Connector.

SAP’s main business is around Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP software, which companies use to plan and operate their business. In SAP’s case, ERP is run as old-school, on-premise software rather than in the cloud as a software-as-service approach. SAP rival NetSuite sells its ERP software in the cloud.

The big deal about social enterprise software — which includes not only Yammer, but the recently IPOed Jive Software, Salesforce’s Chatter, and VMware’s Socialcast — is that collaboration across a department, a division, an entire company, or between a company and outside partners can be as easy as the social experience on Facebook or Twitter. It’s a big craze in enterprise software circles right now, spurred in part by overflowing and inefficient email in-boxes, and the Facebook generation entering the workforce.

I talked with Yammer CEO David Sacks about this yesterday, and he told me that one important aspect of the plugin is that it adds a “follow” button to SAP. So, if you’re an SAP user inside a particular company, you can follow a piece of data or a project or an event in SAP as readily as making a friend in Facebook.

The Connector plugin sends events from SAP to the Yammer ticker, which looks suspiciously like a Facebook activity stream. If something important to you happens in SAP, you’ll see it in Yammer first, and a link will take you directly to the SAP record.

SAP isn’t the only product being integrated into Yammer today. Yammer added five others: GageIn, a business content aggregation platform; Kindling, which bills itself as an ideation company; Moreover Technologies, a media monitoring concern; Planview, a portfolio management product; and SparqLight, which is used to manage workflow in the cloud.

By my count, that makes 15 different services that work with Yammer. The next logical one, on my scorecard, is Oracle. I asked Sacks about that. “It’s definitely on the road map,” he said. Yammer’s strategy is essentially to be a “social Switzerland” that works with all the important business software, whether it runs in the cloud or on-premise. “We’re not going to be beholden to any one technology,” Sacks told me. “We want to be the social layer that lays on top of all the important enterprise applications.”

Whatever Yammer is doing, it appears to be working. It finished 2011 with more than four million end users at 200,000 companies, and late last year it lured a key senior executive away from Salesforce. It is also said to be close to landing a $50 million investment, at an implied valuation variously reported to be between $500 million and $1 billion.

Sacks had nothing to say on the subject of raising money. Last year, Yammer raised $17 million from Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital Partnership; in 2010, it raised two rounds, a $25 million Series C led by US Venture Partners, and a $10 million B round led by Emergence Capital. But something tells me this is going to be a big year for Yammer.

Sales grew by 53 percent over the year-ago period to $22.5 million, which beat the average estimate of analysts by more than $1.5 million, while Q4 billings of $36 million were up 40 percent. Plus, the IPO raised more than $180 million in cash.

And while that’s all good, on an old-school GAAP basis, Jive finished the quarter with a $12.7 million loss that was roughly twice the size of the loss in the year-ago period. While that may seem at first to be kind of a bad thing, it’s not. Since Jive sells subscriptions, it defers a lot of its revenue to later periods, so the revenue it does book doesn’t readily outweigh the costs it incurs to get the sales growth done. This is common with SAAS companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, who also tend to run net losses on a GAAP basis, but focus on their non-GAAP results, which are more indicative of the state of the business.

I talked briefly with CEO Tony Zingale about this and other things, after he finished up his conference call with analysts. A summary of our chat is below, and below that is an interesting infographic that Jive’s PR team included with the earnings release. I thought it was a nice touch, so I’m sharing it here.

AllThingsD: Tony, for those who don’t know, walk us through the key metric in your results that, in your mind, made this a good quarter for you.

Zingale: Growth. Growth in revenue. It’s further amplified in a new market where growth is the paramount metric, and of course it’s measured against a path to profitability. And we communicated that in our guidance to the analysts. But it’s all about growth. If you can’t capture market share as measured by deals with large enterprises and paying customers, then the profitability metric comes into greater play. Plus, in SAAS software companies, profitability always lags because of the ratable revenue model.

How are you finding life as the CEO of a public company? I know it’s not new for you, specifically, but it’s new with this company.

I think it is a testament to social becoming viable and real in the enterprise. You’ve been following the story for more than a year. You can’t go public without recurring, substantial growth, and the kind of customers and the kind of growth as measured by the repeatability of the model. All at the same time, you have to continue to innovate, fend off the competition and deliver that value. It feels good to have cleared the bar of going public, but otherwise, it’s back to work.

Let’s talk about the competition. Are you seeing certain people out of deals where they show up against you?

We do exceptionally well in a head-to-head competition, especially when we see a request for proposal. We’re seeing more of those as we go into 2012. It lends credibility to the social business space, as corporations are thinking of social software as a line item in their budgets. The competitive landscape hasn’t changed. It continues to be the large enterprise software players like Microsoft and IBM. And certainly Salesforce.com shows up when we’re competing for business in the sales department, and a little bit in the marketing department. Salesforce is very well-entrenched in these situations. But we coexist with them all the time. But the landscape hasn’t changed much. It’s competitive in the early part of the process. But when it comes to competing inside and outside the enterprise — the flexibility of our delivery model and the strength of our reference customers — the competitors tend to fall away.

Basically, the argument goes like this: Since the protestors in Egypt organized and collaborated via Facebook and Twitter against a government that didn’t understand the tools, companies that don’t embrace social enterprise and collaboration tools like Chatter will wind up like Mubarak — overthrown, or rather defeated by their competitors.

Yes it’s a stretch, but you certainly can’t fault Benioff on the passion and enthusiasm of his delivery. And since it’s a Salesforce.com event — Cloudforce New York — there’s no one to yank him off the stage.

There will also be news. Benioff will talk about a new mission for Radian6, the social media monitoring outfit that Salesforce acquired in March for $326 million. Expect to hear him talk about the “social marketing cloud” quite a bit.

What does that mean? Radian6 will be getting some new features around engaging and messaging sales leads and contacts on Facebook and Twitter and Web forums, and so on. It will have some powerful tools for filtering all the junk that people post and look for places where people are expressing clear sentiment or intent to buy, asking for guidance, or maybe looking for a deal.

In an example Salesforce showed me in a demo yesterday, if someone is looking for an online stock broker and asks their Twitter friends for a recommendation or about a specific broker they’re thinking of, that company’s social media team will see the message, classify it as a sales lead, and can reach out with special offers. The same thing goes for customer service messages. When someone is unhappy about something — say, their cable service — those posts can be automatically assigned to the right person for a follow-up, a special offer, or whatever the case may be.

People so often turn to Twitter and Facebook to give feedback or to express outrage about products these days, and companies are still figuring out how to respond and work with those platforms. It’s all about protecting brands.

Benioff’s talk takes place against the backdrop of a lot of uncertainty around Salesforce’s share price, valuation and growth prospects. Salesforce stock has been slapped around a bit following an earnings report that analysts didn’t exactly love, yet you can’t deny its revenue growth rates are impressive: Salesforce is on its way to being a $3 billion company next year.

The problem with Salesforce is how the market should calibrate its valuation. The shares have traded as high as $160 and as low as $109 this year, and closed yesterday at $110.58. Premarket sentiment this morning shows Salesforce stock headed up about 3 percent as of 8:08 am ET. Some people — namely hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson — have argued that Salesforce is fairly valued at about 75 percent lower than where it’s trading now. Expect Benioff’s comments today to give the shares a lift. But given how volatile the shares have been, don’t expect it to last.

Excluding charges for compensation and other items, Salesforce reported earnings of 34 cents on sales of $584 million, up 36 percent. The problem was the quarter’s billings — the sum of revenue plus the change in deferred revenue was $567 million; 3 percent, or nearly $20 million, off the consensus.

But never fear, says CEO Marc Benioff. The company is well on its way to breaking the $2.3 billion revenue barrier, and it would be the first cloud software company to do so. The company also said it expects fourth-quarter sales in the range of $620 million to $624 million, which would be ahead of the consensus of $610 million. And it said that its expects earnings of 39 to 40 cents, which is lower than analysts had expected by a penny. One the brighter side, guidance for the 2013 fiscal year, which starts in February, was ahead of the consensus by 4 percent.

The larger question is the size of the cloud opportunity, for which Benioff is the ultimate salesman, spokesman and advocate. As successful as Salesforce has been in disrupting the traditional software model and giving companies like Oracle and SAP the occasional headache, what remains unclear is how much new services like Chatter.com — the social enterprise and collaboration features that Benioff can’t seem to stop talking about — are contributing to the top line, and whether they will justify the cost to build them.

Then there’s the valuation. Salesforce finished the regular session trading at a valuation of 615 times its trailing earnings, and it has been in sky-high territory for some time. Last month, Salesforce stock nose-dived after comments from hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson on CNBC that Salesforce might be due for a 75 percent drop, a la Netflix. Salesforce shares fell nearly 5 percent that day, to $123.

As I write these words, it’s trading six dollars lower than that, at $117. Tough day.

The main one is Box.net, the red-hot cloud storage and collaboration start-up. Yammer users will now get notifications that new files have been uploaded.

Another Yammer integration that will get attention is Zendesk, the cloud-based help-desk service. If your job involves helping people with their IT troubles, Yammer can publish help-ticket updates as different people work on them.

Expensify is a cloud-based expense-reporting service. I’m not sure I see the point of broadcasting anything about expense reports to coworkers. But if you’re a boss, and you need to do a little public praising and/or shaming around the size of expense reports (or people who file theirs chronically late), then I guess it could make some sense.

TripIt is a cloud-based travel and itinerary management service. The Yammer integration will let you know when a coworker is traveling, about to travel, or has come back from a trip.

The other two: Badgeville, which helps companies create loyalty programs through the creation of Foursquare-like game-and-badge programs; and Spigit, which aims to get employees sharing ideas in order to better “tap into the collective intelligence of an organization.”

These aren’t the first integrations with other services that Yammer has done, and certainly not the last. The first three were NetSuite; Salesforce.com’s Chatter, which was kind of meant to tweak Salesforce a bit; and Microsoft’s SharePoint.

The other piece of news out of Yammer today is that it has debuted something it calls its Activity Stream Ticker, which is a live-streaming side module on the homepage that looks an awful lot like the new activity stream on Facebook. Well, if it looks familiar, that’s because it is based on Facebook’s Open Graph protocol. In fact, Yammer is starting to look less like “Twitter for work” and more like “Facebook for work” all the time. (To see what I mean, click the image below for a bigger screenshot.) You can argue that knowing what music your friends on Facebook are listening to isn’t all that useful. But it might be useful to know who in the office is out on a trip, and who is available for that important meeting.

I talked with Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni, who told me it all comes down to working with the open APIs of pretty much any service. That means there will be a lot more integrations like this.

And it makes perfect sense. While there’s a lot of activity around social enterprise software and collaboration services — Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff can’t stop talking about the subject — Yammer has quietly emerged as the market’s leader, on track to have four million verified corporate users. And last month it landed a $17 million Series D round of funding from the Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya.

It’s the third board seat that Schwartz has taken since leaving Sun. He also sits on the board of Taleo, a cloud-based talent management software company, and has a seat on the board of SilverSpring Networks, a smart-grid outfit.

He’s also the CEO of Picture of Health, a start-up focused on applying technology to problems in the health care field.

So what is Moxie? It plays in the same space that Jive Software, Yammer and Salesforce.com’s Chatter do. Its software not only connects employees internally, but with customers and partners as well. It’s the kind of “big theme” that Schwartz likes. “If you’re a company, you have to interact with the customer,” he said to me last night. “Now, do you want to dump a product spec on them, or do you want to captivate their interest over a long period of time? To me, it feels like an I.Q. test.”

Moxie’s software is used in 270 million individual social enterprise interactions per month, and its customers include the consumer electronics companies Epson and Sharp, as well as the Web retailers Newegg.com and Tupperware.

Schwartz, who is also on the board at SilverSpring, was approached for the Moxie board seat by Warren Weiss, a director and lead investor in Moxie and a general partner at Foundation Capital. Weiss and Schwartz are both alums of Next, the Steve Jobs-owned computer company that Apple acquired in 1996, beginning its legendary turnaround.

And how often does a start-up host its own conference for partners and developers? Box.net did that today, too. It was from there that CEO Aaron Levie called me today after delivering a keynote address. I began by asking him about the new syncing service, but naturally what I really wanted to know about was the funding.

AllThingsD: Talk about your syncing feature. What’s that all about?

Levie: Basically, in the consumer space you see a lot of technology that helps you synchronize your information. It’s one of the biggest trends in software and the cloud. And so what we’re trying to do here is just do that for the enterprise. You have to take a different approach. The scale of the management and the security and the collaboration and getting it into business work flow, that’s what makes it enterprise ready. We’re syncing on the Mac and the PC and it’s going to work in your enterprise.

And you’re going to get to other devices — the iPad and Android devices — later?

Yeah. Syncing has a different connotation and purpose on a tablet because you’re syncing less data, but core sync for Mac and PC is what’s going to change the game in the enterprise space.

You’ve done some social things, too. We all know there’s a lot of buzz around social collaboration in the enterprise. Where does Box.net fit there?

That relates to two major themes that we’re really focused on. We’re trying to be the most open platform that you can be. That’s really the power of the cloud. So, unlike Microsoft, where they want you to integrate all their technology together so that you’ve got one big Microsoft vertical stack, our vision is that you’ll use different best-of-breed tools to solve different problems. So you’ll use Salesforce.com for CRM and Google Apps, and Workday or Netsuite. And we really want to integrate the content you have in Box securely with all those applications. And that is now a really big deal for the social space. So our vision is to work with Yammer, Jive and Chatter and any other kind of leading service that emerges so you can take your content from Box and use them with those services. And one thing we announced today is that Salesforce has invested in Box and that we’re working on integrating with Chatter. We’re also going to be building some direct social features into Box directly.

So let’s talk about that round of funding. It’s supposedly $50 million and Salesforce is in. Who else is in?

There’s a little confusion about this. The funding hasn’t been announced officially yet. It is more than $50 million. And yes, Salesforce is in. We’ll say more about it after it’s all closed.

You’ve also disclosed new numbers around customers, right?

We have 7 million users and 100,000 businesses, and it’s being used in 77 percent of the Fortune 500.

Let’s go back to the syncing. How does it work in a practical sense?

You install Box Sync on your Mac or PC, you can synchronize that information back and forth automatically to the cloud. If you add collaborators, they can access that information too. And then on top of that are the social features. We want you to be able to comment, and get a work flow going, to see the updates from the people around you.

You had a big conference today, which I think is your first. Isn’t having a conference like this a big deal for a company that’s still really just a start-up? Who’s there and what do they do?

It’s really a customer and partner conference. I think it will evolve over the years. It’s about CIOs and IT leaders who want to be more innovative using the cloud. It’s also for our partners who are are here to support our customers as well. So you’re seeing companies like Google Chrome, Motorola, Okta, Good Data, Netsuite, and Yammer. They all have booths and are talking about how they integrate their data with the cloud.

I understand you’re working with a little company that’s also based in Palo Alto called Hewlett-Packard. What’s that about?

Box Sync is going to be on small business PCs, and then eventually on their enterprise PCs as well. Eventually part of our vision is to get Box Sync on any system that is creating content.

Is it true that you turned down a $500 million offer for your company?

It is true that people are talking about that. We’re not saying much about that. The high level is that it’s a super-exciting space, and there are companies that want to accelerate their growth into it. We’re focused on staying independent and growing Box. We’ve only completed about 1 percent through the vision of this company.

There are three big announcements coming in Benioff’s remarks, and they’re all connected to Chatter, the social enterprise service that Salesforce promoted in a pair of TV ads that aired during the Super Bowl; Chatter will appear as part of the next upgrade to Salesforce.com, called Winter ’12. The whole idea is to deliver a Facebook- or Twitter-like experience that supplants traditional collaboration methods like email and meetings. Salesforce says its clients who use Chatter are seeing email volume decline by 30 percent; meetings decline by 27 percent.

The first is Chatter Now, which will deliver real-time collaboration within Chatter itself. You’ll be able to see if your colleagues are signed in and available in real time — kinda like on AOL instant messenger or Skype — and you’ll be able to chat and share your screen without leaving your Chatter feed.

The second is Chatter Customer Groups. You don’t need to collaborate just internally, but also with people you do business with. You’ll be able to invite people from outside your company into your Chatter network, and can set rules on what they’re allowed to see and do.

Third is Chatter Connect, which is intended to entice software developers to work Chatter into other enterprise applications — many people think this is where the real action is in the social enterprise field. Ask the soon-to-be-public Jive Software, which can add social features to, among other applications, Microsoft Office. There’s also Yammer, which grabs social feeds from any application that has them, including, uh, Chatter. It’s not the newest idea under the sun, but Salesforce is off to a respectable start: Its first conquest is Microsoft’s collaboration software, SharePoint.

Finally, Benioff will talk about mobile devices. He’s a big fan of Apple’s iPad and has regularly talked about its popularity among enterprise customers. And while Salesforce.com has been available as a dedicated app through the iTunes App store for some time now, it’s about to get a lot more flexible through the iPad browser. Salesforce will announce touch.salesforce.com, which it says will bring the power of HTML5 to enterprise applications.

If HTML5 doesn’t mean anything to you, then you missed one of the more significant controversies about Apple’s iOS devices. They don’t support Adobe Flash, because Apple argues that Flash — which is used widely for Web video and animation — is clunky on mobile devices and drains batteries too fast. When it comes to multimedia and rich experiences on the Web, Apple prefers HTML. So touch.salesforce.com will be the place where users of iPads, iPhones and scores of other mobile devices will be able to go and get an experience that’s geared to their device without having to compromise on the Salesforce features they’re accustomed to on their desktops. Additionally, developers will be able to build their own apps, and all 220,000 apps built using Salesforce’s Force.com development platform will work with HTML5, as well.

That’s an awful lot for one CEO to talk about, and Benioff is a busy man. But, as in the past, he’s not too busy to give TV interviews that coincide with the Dreamforce conference. While he’s regularly found on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” on Monday he showed up on Bloomberg West for a chat with Emily Chang.

The highlight comes early in the interview, when Benioff links the Arab Spring — which has been propelled in part by Facebook- and Twitter-using protesters who have toppled a couple of dictators, most notably Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and now apparently Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Companies are falling, too, Benioff says, but they have a fighting chance to survive if they get a little more social. Get it? Chang, to her credit, doesn’t let this pass without calling it an “extreme analogy.” She then goes on to quiz him about Salesforce landing Groupon as a customer. (And revealing that Groupon CEO Andrew Mason went to Davos. Who knew?)

What else about Salesforce is extreme? Its price-to-earnings ratio is insane, at 602 times trailing earnings; which, of course, leads to the question of whether or not Salesforce is overpriced. Benioff, true to form, dodges the question. It’s all about growing the topline and gaining market share now, he says. No change there. Enjoy the video:

Today, Yammer is boldly touting this fact at Saleforce’s Dreamforce conference, which gets under way in San Francisco today, with a new campaign Yammer is cheekily calling “Friends with Benefits.” The idea, says Yammer CEO David Sacks, is to try to highlight the fact that Salesforce’s Chatter.com — which it launched to great fanfare and at great expense with a pair of ads that aired during the Super Bowl — is really just a “social network inside your sales app.”

Yammer, on the other hand, is intended to integrate social feeds from numerous different business applications. Sacks calls it “social network sprawl.”

Yammer "Friends with Benefits" campaign

So what will Yammer be doing? A pair of mascots — one dressed as a Yammer logo; one that looks suspiciously like the Salesforce.com “no software” slash — will be handing out swag at the Moscone Center. They’ll also be sponsoring free coffee for Dreamforce attendees at two nearby Starbucks locations. Yammer has also unveiled a billboard, touting the campaign, outside its offices.

Things weren’t always so, er, friendly between the two companies. Earlier this year, Yammer made its irritation rather public with the video below, wherein Yammer essentially called Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff — who was a judge at the 2008 TechCrunch at which Yammer first launched — a copycat.

See? Frenemies!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuSLk5FkNrs&feature=player_embedded

A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified “creativity” as the top leadership skill needed in the future. But being creative doesn’t just happen. It’s one of those intangible qualities that people simply have or do not. Yet if you could make it tangible — put it in a bottle and sell it — you’d strike it rich. Clearly, there’s something that innovative companies and people have that the less innovative ones lack. Just what the heck is it?

That’s the question that business professors Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen set out to answer by teaming up with famous innovation guru Clay Christensen. Nearly 15 years ago, Christensen coined the phrase “disruptive innovation,” and wrote two best-selling books on the subject. The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution both examined disruptive technologies, business models and companies.

The Innovator’s DNA, co-authored by all three, makes it a trilogy. In it, they seek to answer the most basic questions about innovation: What makes an innovative company, and what companies can do to become more innovative.

Gregersen is a professor of leadership at INSEAD, the international graduate business school. Dyer, who I spoke with recently, is the Horace Beesley Professor of Strategy in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. I started by asking him how the idea for the book came about.

AllThingsD: What’s the book about and how did it happen?

Dyer: The book is really the product of a conversation I had with Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen. And the question we raised in that conversation was this: Where do disruptive business ideas come from in the first place? What are the origins of disruptive business? And [we wondered] if we could tell people something about where disruptive and innovative ideas come from that might be useful and helpful. One of the things we knew from research in psychology is that if you ask any crowd of people whether creativity is a genetic endowment or if it’s something that’s learned, 90 percent will say it’s genetic. We either have it or we don’t. But the way psychologists research this is they take identical twins — ideally who have been raised apart — and then, between ages 16 and 24, they will give them general intelligence tests. And what they find is that about 80 percent of performance seems to be genetically based. But then they give them creativity tests. There, only 20 to 40 percent of performance is genetically based. What that means is that creativity is much more learned than we think. Therefore the ability to generate innovative business ideas may come from things people learn and do, more than just because the people involved are who they are. For the book, we decided to go back and study business innovators and figure out, as best we could, the antecedents of people coming up with the ideas that they did, and what contributed to their ability to come up with innovative ideas.

And what sorts of things did you study?

One example we looked at was Steve Jobs at Apple. The story that everyone knows is the story of the graphical user interface and drop-down menus and the mouse. He, of course, didn’t originate an idea, but having seen it at Xerox, he returned to Apple laser-focused and determined to apply them to the Macintosh. He assembles a team of engineers and they create the first computer with a graphical user interface. But the idea was really born of an observation. He had seen something that he was able to take back and solve a problem. Another innovation of his was beautiful typography on the Mac and the LaserWriter printer. That came because he dropped out of college, and dropped in on a calligraphy class, and had no idea that it would ever have a practical application in his life. Ten years later, when he was working on the Macintosh, it all came back with the idea for a computer that could create beautiful typography. It was an important differentiation, and it occurred because of a time when he was out exploring. When we looked at the genesis of disruptive ideas, we found that the ideas occured when the innovator was asking a question, engaged in an observation, networked with someone who had a different point of view, or because they were experimenting.

Well, let’s talk about experimenting for a minute. There are lots of ways to experiment with things, and you discuss these in the book. What are they?

We have three ways of experimenting. Most of us think of it as just testing and piloting an idea, and that’s the classic method. But the second is taking apart a product or service or process or idea, and then putting them back together. That’s how Michael Dell came up with the idea for Dell Direct. The other is simply an exploration, where you’re learning a new skill like Jobs did in learning calligraphy — where you’re having a new experience that you can later draw upon. One of the innovators we talked to was a guy named Nate Alder. He came up with the idea for an argon vest. He was scuba diving in South America, and argon gas is used to keep you warm when you scuba dive. He was a snowboarding instructor at the time. He wondered if he could use the same argon to keep warm on cold days. So he came back and developed a line of products called Klymit jackets. And it happened because he was out exploring and trying something new.

So then the problem becomes this: If you’re a CEO or COO reading this book, how do you apply these ideas? I can send my team off for a retreat or something, but they’re not necessarily going to come back any more creative than they were. How do you encourage these behaviors at a company?

What we found is that at innovative companies, there’s a high correlation between the extent to which the leaders of the company engage in and display these discovery skills and the innovation performance of the company. It starts at the top. If you don’t do it, you’re not likely to imprint your behaviors on your organization as processes. What we saw was that when someone like Jeff Bezos is good at experimenting and questioning and coming up with new ideas, he then sets about creating processes within the company for doing experiments. Innovative companies are more likely to have processes that encourage questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. This is how it becomes more embedded in the organization’s culture.

How deep can the questioning go? You can look at Nokia, for example, which made rubber boots and toilet paper. And at some point, someone must have questioned the fundamental business plan that caused it to pivot to building electronics. That’s a pretty fundamental shift. If the questions can go that deep, is it always constructive?

In innovative companies, you find that that kind of question is always okay. And then we try to look at that question from a variety of angles to see if it warrants an answer. In companies that don’t innovate well, those kinds of questions aren’t considered or tolerated. If you don’t try to change the status quo, how are you ever going to innovate? That’s why it’s so important for the leaders to legitimize it, and to say that they want things that are new and different.

This is something you teach, so I wonder what you’ve learned from the process of sharing these ideas with other companies. The reason I ask is that there’s often a lot of entrenched resistance to change.

One of things I’ve done is courses where we teach with the case method — you give the students a case study on Sears or Kmart, and then ask them to come up with a new strategy to compete better with Wal-Mart. I gave one group the task and simply asked them to come up with a new strategy. I gave another group the same case and said that I wanted a new strategy, but that I also wanted it to be creative and innovative. I told them to push the boundaries. In third-party reviews, the groups where I legitimized being creative were all judged as having been more creative and original and likely to make a real difference than in the cases where I didn’t legitimize it.

You also ranked several companies for their ability to innovate. What companies are on your list? Number one and number two are Salesforce.com and Amazon, but I’m also interested in number three. Can you explain them?

We did rank several companies on their innovation prowess, using something we called an innovation premium. We interviewed [Salesforce CEO] Marc Benioff for the book. Salesforce has a founder who is really good at questioning the current model. He asked a fundamental question: In the age of the Internet, why are we installing software on individual computers? He just challenged that whole business model, and continues to try and challenge it now. And we all know about Amazon and Jeff Bezos. He loves to experiment and try new things, even if they’re weird. It’s gone from being the world’s biggest book retailer to the world’s biggest discount retailer to launching the Kindle, and now running Amazon Web Services. They just keep trying new things. Number three was Intuitive Surgical. They make the da Vinci system of surgical robots, and so they’re bringing robot-assisted surgery to the world. They innovated through tons and tons of observations of how surgeons do their work, and then creating robots that could mimic that, and that could be manipulated with tremendous precision.

There’s so much going on at Salesforce it’s hard to keep track of it all. We talked a bit about Chatter.com and the result of the company’s efforts to promote it during the Super Bowl, and also about the state of mobile devices and where its priorities are. But I started with a question about Japan.

NewEnterprise: Everyone is talking about what’s been happening in Japan. You have a data center under construction there. Has there been any effect on your plans?

Harris: No. The data center is in Tokyo so it’s outside of the area directly impacted by the earthquake. We chose the location not only for the earthquake-proof nature of the building, but also for access to diesel generators, which have proven pretty important given the power situation. There’s been no interruption at all in what we’re doing.

So what are your pain points, what are you dealing with this year? Judging by your growth I’m guessing the list is long.

The big one is around trust, reliability, availability and scalability as we grow. I would say it’s not the biggest pain point that we have because we’ve been focused on it for so long. We did have a period several years ago when we had a lot of issues. I think a lot of major services go through that: eBay, Google and Twitter are all examples. I think that’s because none of them are the same. They all grow organically as the customers and technology grow. Chatter is a big focus now.

Speaking of Chatter, how did the Super Bowl ad for Chatter.com work out?

The Super Bowl was an interesting challenge because we had to make sure we could handle the load of Super Bowl traffic. We have an interesting relationship with Will.I.Am. He’s a friend of Marc’s. They started in this odd place where he wants to get into technology and wants to expand his brand. And Marc started talking to him about collaboration. And it was kind of a crazy idea. It was kind of a consumer play with the Super Bowl. Chatter.com is kind of a pro-sumer product where we want individuals to use it. We didn’t really think people sitting on the couch drinking beer would use it right away. But we knew it would attract some attention, but the after effect of discussion around the ad, the YouTube video of the making of the ad, and all the talk around it had a good effect. It got me ready to make sure I had a Web site that could handle a lot of traffic. We partnered with Akamai to cache a lot of the static content. We did a lot of testing of the sign-up process during spikes and peak loads.

Did you the see the spike you hoped for?

We saw a huge spike in traffic to the Web site and traffic to the sign-up page through the following week. A lot of it was from phones, from people sitting on the couch. This is part of our transformation to what we call Cloud 2.0 that we’ve been talking about so much. Historically our Web sites didn’t work on mobile devices that well. Our app didn’t work that well. Chatter.com was a case where we did the mobile version first.

What are you working on right now?

With Chatter it’s about adoption, and how do we get people outside your company collaborating with you. We kind of do that now, but there’s stuff we need to do in the product to make it more usable. That would be a big next step for Chatter. In the Service Cloud we want to reinvent the low end. We’re taking Chatter as an influence, and we look at cool little companies like Zendesk, which does a nice job at the low end of the market. We want to reinvent the portal experience with a Chatter influence on the Service Cloud. On the Sales Cloud we want to focus a lot on the sales rep’s experience, and I think mobile is a big factor there. Phones are a big deal, but tablets are an even bigger deal. So we’re doing a lot of design work and experimentation around the tablet experience. And how much do we re-think our experience on the tablet.

I’ve heard some people say that if you want to invest in the future of the iPad and think Apple stock is too expensive, then Salesforce is a good bet because you’re doing so much on that device. Do you think that’s fair?

We’re paying a lot of attention to the iPad. But we’re expanding that to a tablet focus. We definitely think Google’s Android will get a lot of adoption. It’s a fragmented market still but they’ll get there. I think the iPad is still winning in the enterprise. We don’t want to underestimate Android.

What do you think of HP’s WebOS? Léo Apotheker had a lot to say about that yesterday. Do you have any interest there?

We’re not keeping an eye on that right now. We’re looking at Research In Motion’s Playbook and seeing where that goes mainly because we have a ton of people who use the Blackberry in our customer base. It’s still the best email device. I gave mine up for an iPhone, but for cranking through email it’s still better. And because of our close relationship with RIM we’re going to see if there is something we can do with the Playbook. The mobile space is a hard place to make bets. So we’re working hard on our HTML5 strategy so that we can have something that will work that’s cloud based with other devices.

BroadVision today announced Clearvale Express, which it describes as a free and streamlined version of Clearvale Enterprise, its cloud-based business collaboration platform. It was created in part at the suggestion of Softbank, the Japanese telecom concern that is a partner on the product and will resell it in Asian markets.

Above, that’s an ad for Clearvale Express evoking the old “Pepsi challenge” ads from the early 1980s. In this case, Chatter is being portrayed as “Coke,” the established player being challenged by the upstart, which is silly because Chatter is a relatively new player in an increasingly crowded social enterprise market, though Salesforce is clearly the biggest among the new entrants.

Bashing Salesforce is suddenly trendy. On Sunday, Yammer and Socialcast were spotted buying text ads on Google using the word “chatter” in hopes of catching the odd Google user responding to the pair of TV ads for Chatter.com that aired during the Super Bowl.

And that followed an attack video put out by Yammer highlighting how Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff loved Yammer at a 2008 TechCrunch event and accusing him of basically copying it. You can see that video below. Then there’s Jive, which used an industry survey to try to make a case that it’s a worthier player in the space than Chatter or anyone else, for that matter.

I’m betting there’s more of this public pile-on ahead, though with luck it will be followed by a round of deal-making. Last year, Gartner estimated the 2011 market opportunity for all these apps at less than $800 million and said that it’s tracking at least 80 vendors, at least 50 of which are based in the cloud. That makes the social enterprise market seem like small potatoes at first until you see Gartner’s prediction that these apps will replace email–Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes–as the primary tool for collaboration in businesses for 20 percent of companies within three years.

Combine that with a longer-term shift away from email–by teens, college-age people and younger people entering the workforce–and toward communication via Facebook and things like it, and you’ve got the makings of a fundamental shift in what’s considered normal as workplace technology. No wonder they’re taking swipes at each other. It is, however, already getting old .

Salesforce.com has bought Manymoon, the social productivity start-up.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but one source put the sale at between $25 million and $35 million.

Manymoon makes one of the more popular tools on Google’s apps platform.

The San Francisco company, funded with only a small seed funding round by Harrison Metal, offers an online collaboration app that businesses and consumers can use to organize group projects, conversations, tasks or documents that are often done via email or other software.

Manymoon is rather typical of the innovative app makers the search giant has been courting to populate its marketplace.

Salesforce.com has been moving aggressively into social networking in the enterprise arena with its Chatter offering and more.

Earlier today, in fact, it was also part of a $4 million funding of Seesmic, the social dashboard app maker.

Here is the Manymoon blog post–which just went up–on the sale, as well as a video interview BoomTown did with its co-founders Amit Kulkarni and Manav Monga, just as Manymoon joined the Google Apps Marketplace store rollout in March:

Manymoon Acquired by Salesforce.com

February 1, 2011

Today we are excited to announce that Manymoon has been acquired by salesforce.com!

Manymoon has experienced tremendous growth since our launch, with more than 50,000 businesses adopting our social productivity app. We’ve launched on three major web platforms: Google Apps, LinkedIn, and the Google Chrome Web Store. We think we’re on to something special, building an easy-to-use application that integrates with the tools you already use to help you get work done. Over 1,000 new businesses choose Manymoon each week to track any type of work activity with anyone from anywhere.

We’re looking forward to even more growth in 2011, and are thrilled to now be part of salesforce.com, the leader in enterprise cloud computing, to continue to deliver an amazing social productivity application for everyone to use.

What Does This Mean for Manymoon Customers?

We’ll still be the Manymoon that helps you get work done. The Manymoon team will remain intact and will operate as a separate business within salesforce.com so we can continue our focus on building a great social app that makes our customers more productive and successful every day.

The Manymoon you know and love will remain the same:

* Manymoon Standard, our free product, will continue to be available for existing and new customers. In fact, we’ll continue to add features to our free product. And, if you want to upgrade, you are welcome to do that through the Manymoon website whenever you like.

* Existing premium features, subscriptions and price points will remain unchanged.

* Manymoon will continue to work with Google Apps, LinkedIn and the Chrome Web Store. And, we will continue to develop new features to enhance support of these platforms.

*We’ll continue to support our customers in the Manymoon Support Universe.

Salesforce.com and Manymoon Together

Our approach to the market remains unchanged: work with the tools that people already use online (Google Apps, LinkedIn, Chrome), build an app that requires no training or setup, focus on serving the daily productivity needs of professionals and be on the cutting edge of the latest technologies like HTML5. As we’ve grown, we’ve learned that serving customers is more than just building an app with nifty features. It includes providing scalability, security, performance and support–all areas in which salesforce.com has a proven track record.

Like most startups, we admire salesforce.com as the original cloud computing company that made this industry possible. Over the last 12 years salesforce.com has been an evangelist and driver for bringing applications, platforms and collaboration to the cloud. We’re excited to be part of their vision for cloud, social and mobile, utilize their knowledge and experience to build a world-class social productivity app, and move even faster in delivering new capabilities to you!

What’s Next?

We are going to invest more in what you’ve told us you like about Manymoon: Google Apps, LinkedIn and Chrome Web Store support. You can expect to see many of the key social productivity features you’ve requested released in the near future. We’re also going to be working on some exciting, new developments in the coming months…so stay tuned!

Thanks,

The Manymoon Team

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:39:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40053

In an interesting social enterprise move, popular social networking collaboration tool Seesmic is taking a $4 million investment from Salesforce.com, as well as from Softbank.

The San Francisco-based Seesmic has one of the top desktop and also mobile applications for monitoring a consumer’s various feeds from Twitter, Facebook and more.

So far, Seesmic has received $16 million in total funding. Other investors include Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

Moving beyond a consumer app, where it has one million registered users, Seesmic has also worked closely with Salesforce.com on integrating its Chatter social enterprise network offering.

Deeper integration with Chatter and bridging more social communications with its customers is coming, said Seemsic founder and CEO Loïc Le Meur.

“It becomes an amazing internal dashboard if you are a manager,” said Le Meur in an interview with BoomTown this morning. “It has everything we have built for consumers, but internally.”

There are many such apps and software-based services being developed to inject social into the enterprise, including Yammer, Socialcast and Jive.

It will also be interesting to see if the investment is a prelude to an acquisition by Salesforce.com, to further bolster its own efforts in socializing the workplace.

Here is the official press release:

Seesmic Receives $4 Million Investment

SAN FRANCISCO–Feb 1, 2011–Seesmic, the leading maker of applications that monitor social networks across mobile devices, today announced a $4 million investment from salesforce.com, inc. and a Softbank Group company managed by Softbank Holdings Inc.

Seesmic helps companies monitor, engage and build their brands across social networks and mobile devices. The Seesmic Desktop provides a single console that lets companies view and respond, in real time, to comments being made about their brands in Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Seesmic Desktop works with Apple’s iPhone and Macintosh computers, smartphones running Google’s Android or [Microsoft] Windows Phone 7 mobile operating systems, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and on personal computers.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, and Softbank group join previous investors Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. Seesmic has received a total of $16 million, including the most-recent investment round.

Seesmic and Salesforce.com have worked closely for more than six months to create a seamless integration between Seesmic Desktop and Salesforce Chatter, the industry’s first enterprise social collaboration app and platform. Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook and Twitter–such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds–Chatter lets employees “follow” documents, people, business processes and application data. The result is a new level of productivity that crosses departments and organizational barriers. By integrating with Chatter, Seesmic Desktop will enable salesforce.com users to immediately see comments that customers have posted on Facebook and Twitter.

“Salesforce.com has become a valued partner as we work together to bridge external and enterprise social communication with Chatter. These investments will enable us to reach more enterprise customers” said Loïc Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/in-case-you-needed-reminding-social-enterprise-software-is-going-to-be-big/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/in-case-you-needed-reminding-social-enterprise-software-is-going-to-be-big/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 05:00:43 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2653 Just in case today’s launch of Chatter by Salesforce.com wasn’t enough, the fine folks at Jive Software would like to remind you again how important social enterprise software is going to be, and they have survey data to prove it.

The company asked 500 people at 300 companies, many of them large companies with 10,000 or more employees, about the benefits they were seeing from using social business software, which in this case is Jive, naturally, though an independent firm did the survey itself.

Some of the results were a little vague. For instance, respondents reported a 39 percent increase in “employee connectedness.” Others were more concrete: Jive users generated 32 percent more ideas, sent 27 percent less email and found answers to questions 32 percent faster

And there were benefits for customers. For one thing, employees spent 42 percent more time communicating with them, which in turn led to a better rate of customer retention, 31 percent, while the volume of support calls dropped by 28 percent and sales to new customers jumped by 27 percent.

The survey also found that 83 percent of companies in the survey are preparing to deploy some kind of social enterprise solution across the entire company this year. That finding is at least validated in part by a Gartner study that forecasts spending on enterprise social software will grow a little more than 15 percent this year to reach about $770 million.

Jive, you’ll remember, is the company that landed a $30 million venture capital investment from Kleiner Perkins last summer, and hired former Mercury Interactive head Tony Zingale as its CEO.

BoomTown’s Kara Swisher visited its offices last August, and her video interview with Zingale and Ted Schlein–Kleiner partner and Jive director–is below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/in-case-you-needed-reminding-social-enterprise-software-is-going-to-be-big/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110128/twitter-kicks-off-its-super-bowl-site-using-visas-money/ http://allthingsd.com/20110128/twitter-kicks-off-its-super-bowl-site-using-visas-money/#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:25:42 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28829 Twitter + big TV events are a natural combination, and one that Twitter has been playing up as it sells itself to advertisers. So this one makes perfect sense: An official site for Super Bowl tweets, underwritten by Visa.

I’ve taken a quick tour and can report that it’s more or less what you would expect: A filtered stream of tweets about next week’s Packers-Steelers game. Quite astutely, the biggest emphasis on the opening page is on tweets from NFL players themselves, who have embraced the platform even as the league has struggled to make sense of it.

And there are also some cool graphics that show off trending Super Bowl topics, sorted by time, geography, etc. I’m a little surprised to see Steelers talk so widespread throughout the country, but I guess that’s just my Midwestern bias poking through. (Seriously. Everyone’s rooting for Aaron Rodgers, right?)

Twitter did something similar last summer for the World Cup, but that effort didn’t seem to have been thought through very well, and very quickly became overwhelmed with spam and random chatter. I have a hunch Twitter has worked some of that out this time.

Also worth noting is that in the past, this kind of site might have had a hard time attracting much attention, but now Twitter’s ad platform can give it a real shot in the arm: A link to the site is today’s “Promoted Trend.”

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