Jon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. “We are effectively Salesforce but social,” he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla.

Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tussling with Microsoft and Oracle).

“We have spent time interviewing their dev team,” says Ferrara. “A lot of the stuff they are talking about, they don’t have. Even if they were to build a product, their margins are razor-thin and they are getting hammered.”

Not only is Ferrara talking to Salesforce’s dev team, he just hired away the product director who made Chatter Mobile, Jason McDowall, who will now head up the team building Nimble’s mobile apps.

Nimble isn’t going up against Salesforce head-on. That would be stupid. Instead, it is trying to nail the social component of business communications. Nimble is an enterprise social platform built around contacts, calendars, and communications (both internal and external). It ties together email with social streams (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and puts it all into one interconnected database.

“CRM tools are not about communications,” says Ferrara. “It is a management tool, a way for managers to keep a hand around the neck of managers. CRM doesn’t tell you anything, you have to tell it everything.”

A better way to think of Nimble is as a social contact and communications database which ties into other enterprise and social services. Today, it pulls in messages from Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. With its next release, it will pull integrate with HubSpot (which turns website visitors into sales leads), Infochimps (datasets), and WuFoo (online forms).

The list of planned integrations includes Get Satisfaction, Yammer, Zendesk, Assistly, Quickbooks, and Freshbooks.

The more data Nimble can ingest about your customers, the more it can do with that data in the future. Ferrara’s goal is to make Nimble the “Pandora of contacts”—you put in two names, and it will spit put other contacts like those people. It will ingest your company’s social graph and tell you who you are close to, who is slipping away, and who you should be talking to that you are not.

For Ferrara, this goes way beyond CRM. “Hiring a social media person for the company won’t work,” he says. “The conversation is so vast everyone needs to be a part of it.”

Ferrara built Nimble with $2 million of his own money and 20 developers over two years. He just recently raised a $1 million seed round from Mark Cuban, Google Ventures, and others.

Nimble is still in beta and about to roll out a major upgrade in February which it will start charging for (first 500 people to register here will get 90 days free).

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Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Dan Kaplan, who leads Product Marketing for Twilio and writes occasionally about the extrapolation of the present into the future. Before Twilio, he worked as a contractor in Product Marketing for Salesforce. Follow him @dankaplan or find him on Quora.

You’ve got to hand it to Salesforce: The big battleship of Cloud CRM is remarkably adept at turning its boat around to make war against the startups aiming torpedoes at its hull.

First, it was Yammer.

Flash back to the 2008 TechCrunch50: Yammer enters the market with a bold play: Build an enterprise collaboration app around the status update and newsfeed mechanic, give most of it away for free to let individual teams test it out, and then acquire enterprise customers from the bottom up. Once you’ve got the users and the attention of their bosses, (so the logic goes), you leverage what you’ve launched into a platform that can support a wide range of apps. Some of these apps you build yourself, some you open up to third parties.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, judging the competition, saw Yammer on stage and said, “I really like this company the best”.

Fast forward one year to Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2009 conference, and Benioff is announcing Chatter, a status update and newsfeed app that integrates with Salesforce CRM but otherwise looks an awful lot like Yammer.

Fast forward again to this year’s Dreamforce conference, and Yammer is handing out free Starbucks coupons outside Moscone Conference Center and making a big deal about its new ability to integrate with Salesforce.

Whether or not Salesforce’s entry has made a meaningful dent in Yammer’s enterprise-domination ambitions is an open question, but it seems that Chatter was a depth charge intended for Yammer’s submarine.

This time, it’s Asana.

At the beginning of this month, after almost three full years in development, Asana (a startup founded in 2009 by Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, and early Facebook employee, Justin Rosenstein) launched to the public with an ambitious but now familiar play: Build a team collaboration app (this one around to-do lists and projects), give most of it away for free, acquire enterprise customers from the bottom up and leverage that foundation into a platform that can solve a wide range of businesses’ needs.

Fast forward to literally five days later and Salesforce is announcing Do — a simple collaborative to-do list for teams and projects that integrates with Salesforce’s CRM and looks an awful lot like … Asana.

Yet again, Salesforce heard a ping on its radar. Yet again, the battleship shifted course to attack the enemy submarine. But with Asana, Salesforce now finds itself up against an entirely different, more menacing foe, one whose capabilities are a more dangerous threat than those of the one it faced before.

The thin edge of the wedge.

If you’re wondering how some project management app — even one built by Facebook rockstars — could possibly represent even a minor risk to the master of cloud CRM, consider this brief history of Salesforce.

When Salesforce launched its automation app in 2000, it was essentially a content management system for sales contact records. Armed with this core, Marc Benioff’s marketing genius, and the advantages of the cloud, Salesforce pushed its way into the enterprise through the sales department’s door.

From there, the company has tried hard to take its original product and use it as a platform to launch new applications and empower third-party developers to launch even more. (This is what Chris Dixon cleverly coined the “thin edge of the wedge” strategy: You slide your way into the market’s cracks with one thing, than push on that edge until you’ve busted the whole market wide open.)

One problem Salesforce faces with executing this strategy is that the thin edge of CRM does not abstract particularly well into other problems. Sure, you can bolt things on (like tasks or a social newsfeed) but when it comes down to it, you’re dealing with a core framework that was built to handle customer record data and metadata and not much else.

Salesforce CRM, after all, is basically just a browser-based version of software that originated long before the Web became a full-fledged platform and way, way before the Web went mobile. You can push the CRM framework from its roots in sales into customer support, but if you try to push it much further, you’re going to start crashing into walls.

The other problem is that, as even diehard Salesforce fans will point out, the underpinnings of Salesforce’s user experience are a relic from the early days of the cloud. “Wouldn’t it be great”, you can’t help but say to yourself as you wait for a screen or interaction in Salesforce to load, “if something came along that cracked the core problems of CRM but whose interface didn’t slow me down?”

Enter Asana, stage left, with arguably the quickest, most adaptable project management app on the Web. Behind the surface of Asana’s collaborative to-do list is a real-time interface and a tremendously ambitious vision: To make collaboration so fluid, effortless and fast that the software eventually becomes the standard conduit between humanity and the work it needs to get done. Underpinning Asana is a highly-flexible data model constructed entirely around managing tasks.

Unlike customer records (or social sharing plus manual status updates, for that matter) tasks form the core of everything we aim (or should aim) to do at our jobs. Unlike CRM, you can abstract a properly-designed task framework across every function and every line of work. Among other things, you can go after ticket management for customer support, applicant tracking for HR, bug tracking for IT and, of course, CRM for sales (indeed, there are already companies using Asana for some of these things).

If you want to find a thin edge that can expand into the entire enterprise, collaborative task management is a great place to start. The founders of Asana know this, which is why they are doing what they are doing.

Which brings us back to Salesforce’s Do. Do is the first Salesforce app built on Heroku, coded in Rails and written in HTML5. Thanks in part to the platforms it’s built on, Do works well on mobile devices and is generally much faster and more responsive than the mainstay Salesforce apps built on Force.com. But despite these advances, Do’s design is less carefully considered than that of Asana; its interactions less meticulously crafted; its interface not realtime.

When you play with both apps, it becomes clear that Asana’s team has devoted more time thinking through the problems surrounding collaboration and building the intellectual and technological horsepower necessary to tackle these problems head-on.

In co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, respectively, Asana’s got Facebook’s original architect and the guy who has us pressing “Like” buttons all over the web. In Kenny Van Zant, Asana has the man who built Solar Winds’ bottom-up marketing strategy and knows how to penetrate the enterprise with freemium models like the back of his hand.

Despite Salesforce’s agility and the best sales and marketing machine in tech, it’s going to be hard for Do to win. The app is up against a killer team with an expansive vision, a solid product foundation, and a deep understanding of the problems at hand. If Salesforce wants to protect its core business from Asana’s eventual, inevitable assault, the CRM juggernaut will have to empower Do’s team to do remarkable things, up to and including the cannibalization of Salesforce CRM. So the question becomes: Will the Salesforce battleship, facing down an upstart nemesis, have what it takes to defend against the Asana submarine?

The question is a big one, so break out your popcorn: The war for the future of enterprise software is officially on.

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Today, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to talk about the current landscape of the cloud for the first time since the public back-and-forth between himself and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. For those unfamiliar, earlier this month, Ellison cancelled Benioff’s keynote talk at The Oracle OpenWorld Conference. Benioff wasn’t particularly psyched about the move, and gave a fiery talk from the St. Regis Hotel across the street instead.

Benioff took a few shots at Oracle during his talk, telling listeners to “beware of the false cloud. It is not efficient, it is not democratic, it is not open”. Obviously, you can guess who was the proponent of this “false cloud”. It rhymes with Boracle.

Naturally, Ellison wasn’t going to take that sitting down, and fired back at Benioff, calling Salesforce “the roach motel of cloud services”. Ouch.

Interestingly, when Tim O’Reilly (who interviewed Benioff onstage today) played a little word association with Benioff and mentioned the name “Oracle”, the Salesforce CEO had nothing negative to say; instead, he said that Oracle was a great company and had a “great strategy”.

While Benioff’s tone has definitely tempered somewhat since OpenWorld in relation to Ellison and Oracle, it has not changed in terms of what the CEO sees as the future of his company and the future of the enterprise industry as a whole. Enterprise has to be, needs to be: Social.

What do I mean by that? Well, unsurprising for anyone who is familiar with Salesforce, Benioff has a big old man crush on Facebook.

“I really think that Facebook is becoming a vision of what the consumer operating system is”, he said. “Everything I want, I’m beginning to see on Facebook”.

The CEO was speaking largely in relation to Spotify, which he says has become his favorite music service, a quicker transition than he’s made to any other platform in the recent future. Having the Facebook UI built into Spotify is incredible, he said, allowing friends and colleagues to what he’s listening to in realtime — was inspiring to him.

“I’d like to be doing as many amazing things as Facebook is”, Benioff said, continuing on to say that Facebook is essentially driving the direction in which the entire industry is going, especially that of enterprise, which Benioff has been selling for some time now. Case in point: Here is a guest post from March 2010, in which Benioff argued that enterprise software should be more like … you guessed it … Facebook.

Benioff is quick to say that the social revolution is coming to enterprise software, that it is inevitable, and that those who don’t get on board are going to fall by the wayside. It is of utmost importance for enterprises (and let’s be honest, every company out there) to listen to their customers. And, as Benioff perceptively surmised, their customers — across the board — are on social networks, which is exactly where they should be interacting with them.

Again, the Salesforce CEO referenced the Arab Spring movement in the Middle East, in which Facebook and Twitter played such an integral role in allowing protestors (and one in all) to communicate with the outside world — and each other.

After these social networks enabled this kind of imperative and essential communication, signs like “Thank you, Facebook” were to be seen across the Middle East. As Benioff sarcastically pointed out today, “We didn’t see signs that said, ‘Thank you, Microsoft,’” Benioff said.

Benioff and O’Reilly both agreed that the cloud, mobility, and the shift to social have been fundamentally changing the Web, and that the same can be said for enterprise as well. In terms of social, Benioff said that the affects of the social media revolution have allowed people to interact and converse with brands and companies in realtime — at a pace unprecedented when looking back as little as five years ago. Thus, it is imperative for enterprise companies to be aware of brand impression, brand share, what people are saying about their company in realtime — because it can have a profound affect on your bottom line.

The most recent example? Netflix. Benioff said that the on-demand video network had a “pristine brand”, but when they made the loud price change to their customers’ accounts, splitting DVD and streaming, 27,000 negative comments popped up on their blog post, and Netflix’s market cap declined precipitously.

“There’s a pretty big connection there”, Benioff said. Enterprise needs to be more aware of what their customers are saying, and the key is tapping into social networks, because that’s where they are.

Thanks to Reuters for the Excerpt image

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Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised $81 million in Series D funding from strategic investors Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures with Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, and prior investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth participating in the round. The new investment brings Box’s total capital raised to $162 million (the $50 million round we reported on a few weeks ago is part of this D round). We’ve heard from sources close to the company that the Box’s valuation was above $600 million.

Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

The company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith out of their dorm rooms in 2005 with the goal of making it easy for people to access and share all their content, from anywhere. Today, the company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500. Currently, 100,000 businesses are using Box’s service with 250,000 new users joining each month. This year, Box landed its biggest enterprise deal yet (and one of the largest cloud SaaS deals ever) with 18,000 seats with P&G.

Josh Stein, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was an early believer of Box back in 2006. He says that two things stood out then that showed that the idea born out of Levie and Smith’s dorm room had potential. First, he explains Smith and Levie had one of the best work ethics he’d seen.

He recalled that when the firm would ask Levie and Smith questions about the product and business, the two fledgling entrepreneurs at the time would respond with thoughtful several page emails at all hours of the day. And second, the quality of the early product, which at that point was aimed at the consumer as well as businesses, was intuitive, well-designed and had a valuable functionality.

So why has Box been able to scale from an idea in a dorm room to a nearly billion dollar business? Stein says that Box’s cloud storage platform is a ‘terrific product’ that meets needs for variety of industries. He says that in the past few years, Box has created a new category in enterprise products of what the company intranet could have become.

NEA partner Kittu Kolluri agrees with Stein that Box has become an extension of the intranet, but adds that Box has also become a next generation extranet, as Box allows companies to share files and communicate with clients outside of the company.

Kolluri also highlights the growing trend of the consumerization of IT. He said that NEA looked at a few other companies in the enterprise storage and collaboration space but Box had the most compelling solution that offered enterprises both security as well as ease of use.

And because of its compelling product, growing revenue and strong user base, the company has even become a pricey acquisition target, receiving acquisition offers of $500 million. Kolluri says it was a smart decision for Box to turn these acquisitions down (NEA invested after these acquisitions were rejected). And Kolluri wholeheartedly believes that Box can and will be a public company.

Stein also believes in Box’s potential strength in the public markets. “Box absolutely should be a public company,” he says and confirms that an offering is in the company’s future plans. Stein says that as an SaaS company, Box’s recurring revenue model makes it an ideal public company. Of course, raising this growth round gives Box the flexibility of when they want to enter the public markets, adds Stein.

Levie hasn’t planned on raising additional funds this year after picking up $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year but because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, an expansion round made sense.

“There’s so much change taking place in the enterprise, and we’re trying to build out go-to platform for how people use data, work, and collaborate,” Levie explains. Part of this is taking on more established enterpruse players like Microsoft. “We’re redefining how enterprises share and manage content on Box, while also building a powerful, open ecosystem of partners and developers to help our customers get more value and flexibility from their information than ever before possible.”

Part of this is creating an ecosystem around the platform. 
In November, Box plans to launch the Box Innovation Network, which will provide funding, consulting and other resources to developers building off of Box. Today, Box integrates with 120 applications, including leading cloud solutions including Salesforce, SAP StreamWork, Google Apps and NetSuite.

Box plans to use the new funding for product development, international expansion, and to further build out its infrastructure in the U.S., opening a third data center in 2012. 


Of course, with this expansion will come challenges, says Stein. Growing fast can put strain on an organization. Box has rapidly scaled its team from 125 to nearly 300 employees in 2011 to date, including key senior hires from companies such as Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, NetSuite, and Oracle. Of course these executives has experience with high-growth companies and can help the company innovate while continuing to grow.

As far as strategic partners go, Salesforce and SAP are interesting choices. Salesforce, in particular, as a partner makes sense says Levie considering both of the company’s bets in the cloud. Box will be debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and will continue to roll out deeper integrations in the future. And Levie says that most of Box’s customers user Salesforce as well.

“Box is helping organizations make better decisions faster by bringing new innovation to business information,” said Jai Das, managing director, SAP Ventures. “As an investor and partner, we’re excited about how Box is reinventing content management and collaboration, and look forward to working with them to make customers more productive.”

In the end, we want no more limits for businesses, says Levie. But he knows that to do this Box needs to innovate fast. “Steve Jobs reminded us of challenges of time,” he explains. “We’re trying to make the best use of our time and do a large amount of things rapidly. The ability to capitalize on this growth in the cloud is dependent on how quickly we can go to market.”

We can definitely expect more products and features coming out of Box in the next few months. And clearly, we could also see a public offering as soon as next year. 2012 should be an interesting year for the cloud storage company.

Checkout our recent video with Levie below.

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Today, at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, an animated Larry Ellison took to the stage to unveil an assortment of cloud computing services, which will run the company’s long-time-in-coming (six years, in fact, Fusion Applications — most notably the “Oracle Public Cloud”. And, not one to miss an opportunity, Ellison made sure to take quite a few public jabs at Salesforce — and vicariously, its CEO Marc Benioff — whose keynote earlier in the day was cancelled due to “overwhelming attendance”. Whatever that means. The cancellation created a hubbub and led to Benioff giving his own “off-campus” keynote at the St. Regis hotel across the street. (You can read our coverage of the Salesforce CEO’s talk here.)

As for the substance of Ellison’s keynote, the launch of Oracle’s Public Cloud is noteworthy in that it puts the company in competition with Amazon, Rackspace, and Salesforce, which are the clear leaders in the public cloud computing space. According to Ellison, Oracle’s new public cloud will be available for a monthly subscription and will include resource management and isolation, security, data exchange and integration, self-service sign up, elastic capacity on-demand, virus scanning, and more.

The Public Cloud will mix PaaS and Saas capabilities, the CEO said, enabling customers to run Fusion apps, extensions, and custom-built apps all on the new cloud. Along with a database service and a Java service for developers, customers can take “standard Java and Oracle Database apps and deploy them on the Public cloud without rewriting them”.

The Oracle CEO touched multiple times on the fact that the Public Cloud will be based on industry standards, allowing the programs Oracle hosts on the cloud to be easily transferred to a business’ data centers or to other services, like Amazon’s cloud.

So customers can take any existing database and move it to Oracle’s Public Cloud: “Oh and by the way, you can move it back if you want to. You can move it to the Amazon cloud if you want”, Ellison said. “You can do development and test on our cloud and go into production in your data center … and nothing changes. Everything is portable. Your data is portable”. And thus, the Oracle Public Cloud’s value proposition: It’s interoperability with other clouds.

Of course, Ellison also made sure to point out that its Public Cloud is not compatible with Salesforce’s cloud, which runs on custom languages like APEX and “proprietary” technologies that do not allow businesses to develop apps in a data center and move them to Force.com or other clouds.

And how about this for a shot at Salesforce? Ellison said that Salesforce’s approach constitutes the “ultimate vendor lock-in”, in which a customer can “check in, but can’t check out”, calling it “the roach motel of clouds”.

Ellison then lobbied against multi-tenancy, which allow customers to share a single app but it keeps their data separate — the very thing that Benioff had espoused earlier in the day. Instead, Ellison said that multitenancy was “was the state-of-the-art 15 years ago” and offers a piddling security model, whereas the modern cloud leverages virtualization for its security.

Under this model, customers “get a separate virtual machine, your data’s in a separate database because it’s virtualized”. Salesforce, on the other hand, “puts your data at risk by commingling it with others”, he said.

Ellison did not say when Oracle’s Public Cloud will be available, but with Fusion Apps having arrived, it can’t be far away. Of course, Fusion has been endlessly delayed, so nothing is certain.

Another notable announcement was the so-called “Oracle Social Network”, which, as you might guess integrates social networking into Fusion Apps. In other words, it’s a secure collaboration tool that allows customers to find and collaborate with colleagues both in their enterprise and across enterprises, using similar functionality to Facebook (like information feeds) as well as document sharing within their HR system or their own private social network. And perhaps most importantly, Oracle’s new social network seems to be a direct competitor of Salesforce’s Chatter.

Over the last week, Oracle has made some significant announcements and demonstrations of new products and aspects of its cloud computing services, but these have all still managed to pale in comparison to the feud simmering between Ellison and Benioff over the future of the cloud. (More on Benioff’s side here.)

The fight is on.

Image courtesy of The Frontline

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At the company’s first customer conference today, cloud storage platform Box.net is revealing a number of new features and products. The company is debuting a cross-platform enterprise sync solution for both Mac and PC devices, additional security features as well as new social capabilities.
 
For background, Box, which has 7 million users and stores 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a file storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, access the platform via the mobile web, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

Box.net had previously offered a Sync desktop client, which allowed users to sync Box.net folders with their PC desktops. But Box has totally rebuilt the sync engine and is debuting a new version of Box Sync for Windows and the first-ever Box Sync for Mac. This allows users to access Box files from their desktop, work offline in native applications, sync edits back to Box, and access synced content from any mobile device. Customers including Turner Construction, TaylorMade, Pandora and LinkedIn are early users of Box Sync.


Box Sync for Windows and Box Sync for Mac will available as free downloadable desktop clients for Business and Enterprise customers in October. Additionally, Box and HP has announced that they’re working together to distribute Box Sync on future PCs to HP’s business customers later in 2011.

Box also unveiled a number of security features that will roll out to Business and Enterprise customers in Q4. A new Trusted Access section tracks which browsers, applications and devices are connected to Box. And sharing controls will make it easy for organizations to define sharing permissions by domain and user group. Additionally, Box announced a strategic collaboration with cloud identity provider Okta to help customers better manage identities in the cloud, adding to existing integrations with VMware and Ping Identity.

In terms of social, Box has already added a number collaborative features to its cloud-based platform but today is announcing that it will be brining new social capabilities to users over the next few quarters. These include making Box updates more personalized and intelligent, helping surface and discover more relevant content, and social commenting.

But Levie tells me that Box isn’t gunning to win social space, and wants to actually work and cope with existing social enterprise platforms like Yammer, Jive and Salesforce Chatter. In fact, Box is also announcing an in-depth integration with Salesforce Chatter using Chatter Connect. This will allow Chatter and Box users to collaborate in Chatter with content stored on Box. Salesforce also announced its participation as an investor in Box’s newly announced $50 million funding round.

It’s no secret that Box has seen tremendous growth in 2011 thanks to a growing acceptance of the cloud by businesses and large companies. Box says it is seeing consistent 3x year-over-year revenue growth, and has been adopted by 100,000 businesses, including 77% of the Fortune 500. And the company is even a pricey acquisition target. To help expand even further, Box just raised another $50 million in growth capital. And Levie says we can expect more product announcements from Box in the future.

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Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised a whopping $50 million in new funding with participation from CRM giant Salesforce.com. Past investors also participated in the round, as well as new ‘strategic partners’, who will be revealed soon. Box’s past investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners. This brings Box’s total funding to $128 million.

Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

The company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith out of their dorm rooms in 2005 with the goal of making it easy for people to access and share all their content, from anywhere. Today, the company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500. This year, Box landed its biggest enterprise deal yet (and one of the largest cloud SaaS deals ever) with 18,000 seats with P&G.

The company says that 200,000+ new users join each month and the average enterprise deployment size doubles every two quarters. Over 1,000 new companies sign up for the business and enterprise editions monthly and Box has seen a 600% growth in mobile deployments in 2011 compared to all of 2010.

CEO Levie tells us in the video below that the future of enterprise software will be personal, social and smart, which means that content will actually connect users and help productivity in the enterprise. help connect users to content, make better decisions, faster, and work more effectively with anyone.

Box raised $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year but Levie says that because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, an expansion round made sense. And the company has even become a pricey acquisition target.

Salesforce, in particular, as a partner makes sense says Levie considering both of the company’s bets in the cloud. Box will be debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and will continue to roll out deeper integrations in the future. And Levie says that most of Box’s customers user Salesforce as well.

Levie explains that the company didn’t need to raise more money, with the potential acceleration of growth in the cloud, the company wanted to be prepared to mitigate this growth. The new funding will be used to add additional infrastructure, for research and product development and for hiring. There are no current acquisitions on the horizon, but Levie says that the company would certainly be interested in acquiring if there is the right fit.

Check out our video with Levie chatting about the new round below.

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Salesforce has just bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly. The purchase price is $50 million, and the deal is all-cash.

Assistly helps companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more.

Update: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is reporting that the acquisition price is $50 million, plus an additional $30 million in deferred payments over two years for a total of $80 million.

Assistly and Salesforce already had a previous relationship. Salesforce made a strategic investment in Assistly. And the startup recently launched an app on the AppExchange that allows sales and support teams see data, like customer contact info and status while working on cases direct from Salesforce.

Assistly, which only launched to the public last September, offers companies an option of paying for total usage instead of seats, so people can jump in occasionally and only be billed for time spent on the platform. This is especially ideas for small to medium sized businesses. The company is backed by Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Kenny Van Zant, True Ventures and Social Leverage and is used Instagram, Klout, One Kings Lane, Spotify and Square.

The startup was founded by Alex Bard, Gary Benitt, Jeremy Suriel, and Brad Birnbaum, each of whom previously worked together in building customer service-based companies back in the 90′s. The first, called eShare, was acquired in 1999; the second, called eAssist Global Solutions, was eventually acquired in 2004 after stumbling through the dot com bubble burst. Following the eAssist acquisition three of the team members left the space to start Goowy, a Flash widget maker. The team reunited to develop Assistly in the customer service space.

Salesforce’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said of the acquisition: Salesforce has spent over a decade democratizing enterprise applications in the cloud…The Assistly acquisition doubles down on that strategy by putting us at the heart of the new trend of customer service help desk applications that have instant sign up and zero-touch onboarding, expanding the potential reach of the Service Cloud to millions of companies around the world.

Salesforce already offers the Service Cloud to companies, which helps businesses connect with customers across both traditional and social channels. But Assistly extends this offering to the small business community, and helps Salesforce reach this audience.

Salesforce recently bought social media monitoring company Radian6 for over $300 million.

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Salesforce’s ‘social network for the enterprise’ Chatter has been the company’s first real foray into incorporating social with business functions. Salesforce originally announced Chatter back in November of 2009, and the application launched into public beta in June 2010 after four months in private beta. Salesforce has said publicly that Chatter has been its most successful product launch to date, even spending millions on a Super Bowl ad for Chatter. And recently Salesforce rolled out a new, more Facebook-like version and made the application free for users, with premium features as an optional add-on. And today, in conjunction with the company’s Dreamforce conference (the theme of which is the social enterprise); Salesforce is debuting a brand new Chatter complete with realtime chat, support for customer groups, a new API, and a brand new HTML5 mobile app.

Social Strategy

As Al Falcione, Salesforce’s VP of Product Marketing, tells me there are three main components to a company’s strategy for social enterprise. First, the company has to develop a social customer profile, which captures a company’s likes on Facebook, Twitter communications, connections on LinkedIn and more. Basically, customers want social insight into the web presence of potential company they are working with.

Second, a company needs to develop and employee social network, where a company’s employees can exchange internal, realtime communications and collaborate on work. And third, Salesforce believes that companies need to develop a Customer Social Network and a Product Social Network. Customer social networks allow companies listen to and engage with customers in an entirely on social channels like Facebook and Twitter. And companies can also bring their products into social networks so they can be part of the conversation, allowing consumers to not just “fan” a product, but become its “friend’”

Chatter

And these premises are the basis for what Chatter has become in this iteration of the ‘Facebook for the enterprise.’ Salesforce Chatter is debuting ‘Chatter Now,’ which adds realtime chat into the applications. Chatter users will be able to collaborate with colleagues, directly in Chatter and see when their colleagues are online (similar to the way you can see your Gmail contacts online), chat with them and share their screen without leaving their Chatter feed. In fact, the whole Chatter experience resembles a cross between Facebook and Gmail.

Another new feature that will be added in the next version of Chatter is the ability to create private, social groups for customer interactions. So Chatter users will be able to invite people outside of their organization into their Chatter network to collaborate in these private, secure groups. Within these groups you can share files, comment and more. To invite a client into a group, you can simply send an email invite which will contain a secure link.

Lastly, Salesforce wants to allow Microsoft Sharepoint and others users to leverage their files inside Chatter and bring collaboration to files in Sharepoint. Companies will be able to embed Chatter feeds in a SharepointMySite or TeamSite and share documents from Sharepoint to Chatter. And ‘Chatter Connect’ makes other third-party applications social by extending Chatter into other applications, such as intranets and portals, custom mobile apps and other enterprise apps.

Mobile And HTML5

Similar to many consumer applications like Pandora, Salesforce is leveraging the power of HTML5 to provide a rich mobile experience to users. ‘Touch.salesforce.com’ is a new mobile site that has been built using the latest HTML5 technology, and will allow for cross-platform access for all of Salesforce’s applications in the cloud, including Chatter, the Service Cloud, CRM and more. And all 220,000 custom apps built on Force.com will be mobile with touch.salesforce.com.

As Falcione explained social networking and mobile web use is so prevalent in the consumer everyday experience, it makes sense that these actions will bleed into the work environment. And this is much easier accomplished in the cloud. The newest version of Chatter, with private work groups, realtime chat, screen sharing and more aims to replicate some of the features offered by Skype, Gmail, Facebook and others.

The social enterprise is no longer an afterthought for many companies; and we may be at the cusp of a huge movement (that is worth more than $1 billion in revenue) that is even bigger than creating the ‘Facebook for the enterprise.’

The major question is how many ‘social enterprise’ applications do we need in the enterprise, and will there be a few players who dominate the space, similar to the way Facebook and twitter dominate the social consumer space. Jive just filed for a $100 million IPO, Yammer is growing, and there is some consolidation already taking place. We know Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff is extremely bullish on social and will continue to put resources into Chatter and the company’s social strategy. I’m sure we’ll hear more about Salesforce’s social plans tomorrow at Dreamforce, but it should be interesting to see how the space evolves over time.

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Social application developer Seesmic is making a big move into the social enterprise and is debuting a dedicated Android app and iPad app for Salesforce’s CRM product (Windows Phone 7 will also be added soon), called Seesmic CRM. The Android app will be launched tomorrow morning at Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce, and Seesmic will launch the iPad app in a few weeks.

For background, Seesmic, which was founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, helps you monitor and track the social web. Seesmic’s desktop, web, and mobile clients integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The bonus of using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of social web services, like YouTube, Foursquare, Techmeme, LinkedIn and others.

But of late, Seesmic has been dabbling in the enterprise and launching more business-focused features. Last Fall, Seesmic launched a deep integration with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise, Chatter. And then earlier this year, Salesforce led a $4 million round in Seesmic.

Basically the Seesmic CRM Android and iPad apps bring all the functionality of Salesforce’s CRM to mobile phones. Users can search their Salesforce.com account from the native apps; look up leads, contacts, accounts, related activities and chatter newsfeeds on the go; create and update leads, contacts, tasks, and events; log calls and emails after meetings; and much more. And the apps leverage the mobile OS; allowing users to see maps of their leads respective to their current location; upload photos and more. While pricing hasn’t been announced yet, Seesmic may charge $10 per month per user for the apps.

Le Meur tells us that he isn’t competing with Salesforce because the CRM giant currently doesn’t offer in-depth Android and iPad apps. In fact, Seesmic has been working ‘hand in hand’ with Salesforce’s mobile team to develop these native apps. And Salesforce is particularly bullish on the social enterprise of late—’Welcome To The Social Enterprise’ is the theme of Dreamforce this year. As Le Meur says, “We are working with Salesforce, not competing with the company.”

Of course, it is interesting that a Twitter-platform developer is shifting focus away from building for the consumer and focusing on the enterprise. In March, Twitter basically told developers to avoid competing with them on native clients. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t want developers to build off their platform, they just don’t want developers to build clients that mimic Twitter’s own services.

Thus, Seesmic has found a new user base in businesses. Le Meur explains that bringing mobile and social to the enterprise is the future for Seesmic. While the startup won’t give up its web and mobile apps (the company’s Android app has over a million users); all of Seesmic efforts are now fully ‘focused on bringing social to business users,’ says Le Meur.

Seesmic also shuttered its BlackBerry app a few months ago. You can watch Le Meur’s recent conversation with TechCrunch TV’s Andrew Keene here.

(Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington was an early investor in Seesmic.)

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