DemandGen Reports

Salesforce.com recently announced its acquisition of Dimdim for approximately $31 million in cash, which will extend the Salesforce Chatter collaboration platform with critical real-time communication technologies, following the Facebook model of combining real-time collaboration and communication into a single integrated service.

The acquisition will enable Salesforce.com to build on the momentum of 60,000 Chatter customers, accelerating the industry shift to Cloud 2.

Salesforce.com challenged developers to build the next killer app on the Force.com platform at AppQuest 2010. While over 100 apps were submitted, BranchIt Corporation, provider of cloud-based relationship discovery solutions, was selected as the winner. Built using Force.com, BranchIt for Chatter is immediately available for deployment on the ChatterExchange, an entirely new category of social apps on AppExchange 2.

BranchIt for Chatter is designed to uncover relationships held by employees across the entire company and feeds them through Salesforce Chatter to users. Specific functionality includes automated contact syncing, relationship discovery, relationship strength scoring, contact following, account following and related management reports. The application makes use of Chatter, Jigsaw, Apex code, Visualforce, various e-mail platform integrations and is accessible via standard web browsers and mobile devices.