The announcements are coming fast and furious at Dreamforce, the global gathering of Salesforce.com’s cloud computing community. It’s only fitting that today’s major announcement is the $212 million acquisition of Heroku, a three-year-old company that runs a “platform” for developers using the highly agile Ruby-on-Rails development framework for rapid-fire introduction of new applications and services.

Calling it “our seventh cloud,” Benioff has made Heroku and its ability to support Ruby, a peer with the core Sales Cloud (the initial salesforce management and CRM offering), Service Cloud (back-end for customer service operations including contact centers), Chatter (collaboration), Jigsaw (business data), the Force.com (ISV development tools) and Database.com (pure DBMS-designed to compete with Oracle and Microsoft). When Heroku chief executive Byron Sebastian joined Benioff on the stage at Dreamforce, he showed how the platform could be used to build Facebook pages quickly and easily for major brands, retailers or product companies.

While the Heroku acquisition puts fast assembly of Web sites and services in the spotlight for the moment. Looking at the full-spectrum of “clouds” (of “platforms”) launched by Salesforce.com reveals a rich resource of genetic material for both customer-facing and intra-enterprise collaboration. This point was driven home on the first day for Dreamforce during which several sessions when the demonstration of Service Cloud 2 “Live” depicted an operating contact center with live agents responding to emails, tweets, instant messages and “live” questions from attendees.

Demonstrations by Interactive Intelligence and LiveOps give the real world feeling to the Recombinant Contact Center and new architectures for accommodating the demand for both self-service and assisted service over a multiplicity of channels. “We have the technology!” And the demand for a flexible approach that spans “the cloud,” agile programming platforms, widgets and gadgets on agent screens, apps or browsers on the client side will give companies a broad range of solutions providers to choose from.

Benioff explicitly takes on Microsoft and Oracle, but in the realm of customer care, self-service and assisted self-servcie, he’ll have to add Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent/Genesys, Voxeo and perhaps Amazon.com to the list of alternative solutions providers. The five new clouds that his company has introduced at Dreamforce 2010 provide ample proof that he’s preparing for battle.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Salesforce.com, Recombinant Communications