There haven’t been any financial details of the deal disclosed at this time, but the ChoicePass website will be shutting down by the end of June.

Apparently the two companies share the same entrepreneurial spirit and passion for employee recognition. The acquisition will extend the company’s reach and integrate their capabilities into the already broad list of enterprise solutions currently available to Salesforce.com customers.

Here’s what ChoicePass had to say on their blog site:

“We started ChoicePass with a vision to change the way organizations reward their employees. Since launching our Perks product, we’ve found that there is massive demand from businesses for innovative ways to manage employee engagement, rewards and incentives. It has been an amazing experience for us to work with such great companies, partners and of course, people.”

“Today, we’re delighted to announce that the ChoicePass team will be joining salesforce.com. We share the same vision and passion for employee recognition, as well as our entrepreneurial spirit.”

“We want to thank the ChoicePass community – members, partners, investors, advisors, vendors and merchants – for using and supporting ChoicePass! We have been on an incredible journey thanks to you and look forward to helping companies connect more than ever before with employees across the social enterprise.”

Earlier this month, Salesforce.com also acquired Buddy Media in an effort to break into the social listening and marketing arena. ChoicePass and Buddy Media are just a few components of Salesforce.com’s increasingly comprehensive business and enterprise solutions portfolio.

Now we are hearing from Lazerow in a totally different capacity. In a very recent YouTube video of his own creation the successful media creator addresses his struggle with a lifelong heart condition (VSD) that rendered him lifeless several times, only to be saved by multiple surgeries and advanced medical technology.

Interestingly, Lazerow doesn’t speak a word in the video. The entire narrative takes place on his iPad in what appears to be his home office. It’s obvious he is overcome with joy over the success of Buddy Media and the overwhelming deal he has just made with Salesforce.com making him a billionaire.

The overarching theme is living without fear and how meeting death head on (literally) allowed him to see no need for fear in the way he lives his life. It’s an interesting way to celebrate success, but also a different side of business that we don’t often see. Take a look at his video and decide what you think about life’s struggles and people’s ability to make a difference.

Salesforce.com hopes to have the acquisition of Buddy Media complete before the end of October this year.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com comments on the acquisition of Buddy Media:

“Salesforce.com now has the number one players in social listening and marketing – Radian6 and Buddy Media,”

“With CMOs surpassing CIOs in spend on technology within the next five years, our Marketing Cloud leadership will allow us to capitalize on this massive opportunity.”

Michael Lazerow, co-founder and CEO Buddy Media comments on the power of joining with Salesforce.com:

“Buddy Media’s mission is to eliminate the current state of anarchy in social marketing,”

“With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers will be able to unify their efforts to better organize their teams, optimize their social programs and deliver real business results.”

Marcel LeBrun, SVP of Salesforce Radian6 also comments on the addition of Buddy Media’s unique addition to the Salesforce portfolio of solutions:

“Social media has caused the biggest transformation in marketing since the Mad Men era, causing CMOs to completely re-think their strategies,”

“By bringing together market leaders Radian6 and Buddy Media, we are doubling down on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to provide CMOs with the ability to manage the entire social marketing lifecycle.”

Here’s some financial data on the impact to Salesforce.com from the acquisition of Buddy Media:

Q2 FY13: Given an expected fiscal third quarter close date, this transaction is not expected to have any material impact to salesforce.com’s fiscal second quarter FY13 revenue or EPS results, previously guided on May 17, 2012.

Q3 FY13: Salesforce.com expects to provide revenue and EPS guidance for its fiscal third quarter FY13, including the effects of this transaction, when it announces results for its second fiscal quarter, ended July 31, 2012.

FY13: The acquisition is expected to increase revenues by approximately $20 million to $25 million, and to reduce non-GAAP EPS by approximately $0.14 to $0.15 in the second half of the year ending January 31, 2013 depending on the final acquisition date. To reflect the impact of this acquisition, the company is updating the full-year guidance it provided on May 17, 2012. Specifically, the company now expects FY13 revenue in the range of approximately $2.990 billion to $3.025 billion, and FY13 non-GAAP EPS in the range of approximately $1.45 to $1.49.

Non-GAAP EPS excludes the impact of the following non-cash items: stock-based compensation, amortization of purchased intangibles from acquisitions, and the amortization of debt discount on the company’s convertible senior notes, as well as the tax consequences associated with these items. The financial impact of the acquisition on a GAAP basis cannot be estimated until the allocation of the purchase price is completed following the closing of the acquisition. However, salesforce.com currently expects that the dilutive impact of the acquisition to EPS will be significantly greater on a GAAP basis than a non-GAAP basis.

Buddy media brings along social media marketing accounts from giants like Ford, Hewlett Packard, L’Oreal and Mattel. They currently serve over 1000 customers and provide campaigns on platforms like Twitter, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Linkedin.

The news was first reported by All Things D, which cites unnamed sources as saying the two companies have agreed to terms of the sale, though the purchase is not yet final. Buddy Media will be bought for more than $800 million, a bid by Salesforce that evidently beat out a lower one by Google.

Salesforce is an enterprise cloud computing company whose mission is “the end of software.” To that end, the company provides numerous cloud solutions for businesses, including Sales Cloud sales force automation, Service Cloud customer service support, and Radian6 social media monitoring, which Salesforce acquired las year. The company is beating earnings estimates and rising in prominence as one of the top cloud solutions companies in the U.S. It has also recently updated its Chatter cloud collaboration service to include real-time messaging.

Buddy Media specializes in Facebook advertising. It manages a brand’s total social media presence on Facebook, maintaining pages, app, ads, and offers. The company also manages brand image on other social networks such as Twitter and Google +. Buddy Media claims to have eight of the top ten global advertisers as clients. Earlier this year Buddy Media appointed a new president to the company, Susan St. Ledger.

With Facebook now public and desperately trying to raise revenue forecasts, it makes sense that Buddy Media would be a hot commodity. With this acquisition, Salesforce is positioning itself to be the middleman between advertisers and Facebook. And with both Radian6 and Buddy Media, Salesforce is now the go-to solutions company for social media advertising.

(via All Things D)

Today’s announcement of Chatter Messenger and Chatter Screensharing adds new power to what we already call “the engine of the social enterprise,” in the words of Senior VP and Chatter General Manager Kendall Collins. Ever since Chatter first went into general release, going on two years ago, it’s steadily taken on new capabilities that have made other tools seem increasingly irrelevant; Messenger and Screensharing add real-time facilities that further extend the rich Chatter portfolio of threaded conversations, object-following updates, in-line processes, and secure external customer groups that combine to break down silos and add value to other IT assets.

VentureBeat, through an interview with Collins, reported on some of the details of the new features. According to VentureBeat, Chatter Messenger will launch around the time of Dreamforce, Salesforce’s cloud computing business conference scheduled for mid-September. Messenger will be integrated with Chatter and won’t require an extra download. Chatter Screensharing will only be tested in a closed beta during the third quarter of 2012, and has no official target date.

(via VentureBeat)

A major component of this deal is that Salesforce deliver the solutions in compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). The deal propels these government agencies into the 21st century and allows them to stay up to date on innovations and upgrades in the data management and applications industry and do so without compromising security.

Vivek Kundra, executive vice president of emerging markets at Salesforce.Com comments on the deal:

“The bureaucracy of legacy government IT is preventing agencies from embracing innovative technologies that deliver immediate value,”

“We must end the era where government spends millions of dollars and waits years for IT projects that never work. Now, salesforce.com offers a solution the government needs to break down barriers to innovation and eliminate wasteful IT spending.”

John Conley, executive director of Colorado Statewide Internet Portal Authority also comments on the deal with Salesforc.com:

“We are committed to providing quality services that deliver value for Colorado taxpayers and simply make government work better,”

“Salesforce.com’s cloud technologies, including applications on AppExchange for Government, are helping us increase efficiency and provide a more responsive government that delights the constituents we serve.”

Michael Togyi, President and CEO of BasicGov, a provider of licensing, permitting and enforcement apps adds his sentiments about the partnership:

“AppExchange for Government provides a great opportunity to develop and deliver apps for government with the social, mobile and trusted capabilities of the Salesforce Platform,”

“We are excited to be one of the first partners to leverage the app marketplace to help our customers transform government for the social era.”

Dennis Wall, senior vice president at Cloud Sherpas adds to the sentiments:

“The social revolution represents an amazing opportunity for companies like ours to help government transform for the social era,”

“We’re excited about the Salesforce Government Partner Accelerator Program as we continue to build our business deploying salesforce.com’s social, mobile, and open cloud computing technologies.”

This looks like it is going to be a powerful asset for our government institutions. I think it has always been a problem for government to keep up with the fast paced technology sector, and this partnership will provide a valuable resource for our ruling body to draw from to that end. Once the these new tools are available, there will also need to be investments in training for people who should be aspiring to get the most mileage out of them.

Our ruling class is composed of many members who were around long before these advances and the new system might be met with some resistance. It will be interesting to see how it integrates into the way they do business.

Swensrud explained this concept of "Cloud 2", which is an internal term the company has been using, and basically refers to the next generation of cloud computing, which stems from the rise in general social media use and mobile/smartphone use, where people are accessing the Internet more from their pocket, as opposed to their desktop. Salesforce sees its strategy as "accelerating the market shift" to Cloud 2, which it says is "inherently social, collaborative and delivers real-time access to data and information across new mobile devices."

Swensrud tells us that since the company formed in 1999, they’ve been taking many of the leading trends on the web and applying them to the enterprise. Chatter is simply an extension of this. In fact, Swensrud says the company’s mantra now is along the lines of "Why doesn’t all enterprise software work like Facebook?"

Milestone

One announcement Salesforce is making today is that Chatter has achieved a new milestone of 500 companies in its private beta, with another 1,000 companies on the waiting list, and it will be coming to all customers later this year.

With the Force.com platform, users began using Facebook-style collaboration technology, Swensrud says, and users started thinking, "why don’t we have the same-style collaboration in all business apps – not just CRM app – basically, anything that runs inside of a company?"

That’s why Salesforce is allowing companies to build Cloud 2 apps with Force.com, Swensrud says. It will run all over the web and have all the features of Chatter. Companies can "Chatterize" any app they build with Force.com – Cloud 2 apps.

20 companies are going live with such apps right away.

AppExchange2 and ChatterExchange

Salesforce today is also introducing AppExchange2, a new version of its market place for cloud business apps, with a new category of social enterprise apps – the ChatterExchange, which will include the apps from the 20 companies and others that get built in the future. This can be found at appexchange.com/chatter

Service Cloud Goes Chatter

A big part of Salesforce’s announcement is that Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 is going Social with Chatter. The company has extended the Chatter private beta to more than 250 Service Cloud 2 customers. Salesforce says that in combining the Service Cloud and Chatter, companies can boost productivity gains by empowering service agents with new capabilities for:

- Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates

- Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business

Swensrud says the companies in this private beta range in all sizes and across industries, with the largest being in the Fortune 500. ServiceCloud2, he says allows companies to not only communicate with customers via social networks and search engines, but when they receive customer inquiries, they can now use Chatter to work with all the departments within the company to sort things out.

Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Service Cloud 2 is available now and pricing starts at $65 per user per month. AppExchange 2 and ChatterExchange are live today, and customers should contact partners for pricing and availability of their applications.

"Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be deeply connected," she tells WebProNews. "In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will instantly become social."

Salesforce Chatter lets users collaborate securely in real time with:

- Profiles
- Status updates
- Feeds
- Groups
- Social Apps
- Social Content (docs, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.)
- Social Sharing Model
- Twitter and Facebook
- AppExchange (apps build on Force.com platform)
- Mobile (available for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device and iPhone)

The Salesforce Chatter social platform includes a rich set of pre-built social components. Developers will be able to add profiles, status updates, groups functionality, feeds, and social content to apps. There is a set of APIs that let developers push data from any app into Chatter feeds, and there are Google, Facebook, and Twitter developer toolkits.

Salesforce Chatter will launch in 2010, and will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user, per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content, and Force.com.

Related Articles:

> Adobe Teams With Salesforce on New Flash Builder

> Salesforce Launches Mobile App Update for iPhone 3.0 OS

> Salesforce Gives Force.com Users Free Sites

"Flash Builder for Force.com is a jointly developed IDE that provides a single, powerful tool for building cloud-based RIAs, which can easily be deployed to end users through the browser using the Adobe Flash Player or directly to the desktop via Adobe AIR," explains Michelle Perkins on the Adobe Flash Platform blog. "This tight integration enables client-side data management and synchronization between cloud and client, simplifying the development of applications that seamlessly run online or offline across operating systems and devices, while taking full advantage of the proven scalability, security and reliability of the Force.com platform."

You can get an idea of what the product is about in the following introduction video.

Features include:

- Professional Eclipse-based IDE, unifying Adobe Flash Builder and the Force.com IDE into a common, highly productive environment for building a variety of Force.com applications.

- Pre-built integration with Adobe LiveCycle Data Services for client-side data management and synchronization services, automatically synchronizing data between the Force.com database and an Adobe AIR secure local data store on the client, allowing developers to build apps that seamlessly span connected and disconnected environments.

Final delivery for the product is expected to go down in the first half of next year. A developer preview version is currently available at the Salesforce developer site.

Related Articles:

> Google Improves Flash Indexing Capabilities

> Windows Mobile 6.5 Launching In October

> Salesforce Launches Mobile App Update for iPhone 3.0 OS

> Salesforce Gives Force.com Users Free Sites

> Salesforce Introduces Free Mobile Service

Salesforce says with Force.com sites, you can build and roll out sites five times faster at about half the cost of traditional software platforms. A few examples the company provides in its showcase include:

- A Starbucks volunteer coordination site
- A Future Leaders teacher recruitment site
- A Qualcomm venture capital site
- A NJ Transit group ticket sales site
- A Lincvolt non-profit site
- A Cathedral Partners business marketplace site, and
- A ThomasNet recruiting site

A few of these and others are looked at in the following clip:

"A revolutionary new capability of the Force.com platform, Force.com Sites allows you to run your Web site and Web applications in our cloud. No hardware. No software. No infrastructure required. Just your Sites and our Cloud," explains Gordon Evans on the Salesforce Blog. "Over the last few months, 85 companies had access to the Force.com Sites customer preview. The sites and apps they built had 38 million page views and served more than 5 terabytes of data."

Force.com walks users through the process of setting up a database, building out workflow rules – email alerts and approval processes. Pages are coded with RUI framework and standard web technologies like HTML, Flash, javascript and CSS. Users can configure their sites with their own domain name or get one from Salesforce. RSS feeds are also available for enabling.

The company says that since users’ sites are run on their cloud infrastructure, they are more secure, and more reliable. They say users don’t have to worry about hardware, a software stack, back ups, performance tuning, security, or upgrades.

Salesforce is letting Force.com users build and run their first site for free. This should be an attractive offer for quite a few people.