Salesforce Chatterizes 10,000 Of Its Customers First Week After Public Launch

Unsurprisingly, Salesforce is seeing rapid adoption of its social collaboration platform Chatter among its existing customers after launching to the public last week. In its first week of general availability, Chatter has been integrated by 10,000 of Salesforce’s 77,300 existing customers, or 13 percent of Salesforce’s customer base.

Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said in a statement: “We’ve never seen this kind of excitement around a product release before.” Chatter was made available to the public last week after four months in private beta. Announced last November, Chatter leverages what Benioff calls the Cloud 2, delivering realtime access to data and information, using social sources, such as YouTube and Twitter.

Of course, there is no financial barrier for existing Salesforce customers to use Chatter. For Salesforce customers, Chatter is free all paying users of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter-only user licenses are available for customers using Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition for $15 per user, per month. So it appears that these 10,000 customers aren’t paying for Chatter.

In contrast, Chatter competitor Yammer now has 70,000 corporate clients, and 800,000+ total seats (users), with over 1,000 paying customers. While 13 percent adoption is certainly impressive in the first week of availability, I think the real test will be to see the adoption of Chatter amongst paying clients.