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To: stockman_scott who wrote (378)	12/3/2009 5:07:33 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1685

Salesforce.com has introduced Chatter, a social networking application: Salesforce.com gets social Posted by Adam Lashinsky, Editor at Large Fortune December 3, 2009 8:02 AM CEO Benioff goes from "cloud" to crowd. Marc Benioff, the man who invented cloud computing at least as much as Al Gore invented the Internet, is pushing a new idea. It's called Chatter, a mashup of Facebook and Twitter for the workplace that his company, Salesforce.com (CRM), plans to begin selling next year. Salesforce.com's main product is something most worker bees will never see. It's an online tool that salespeople use to record their prospects and completed deals. It has done so well because it mimics far more expensive software pioneered by Siebel Systems, which is now owned by Oracle (ORCL), where Benioff began his career. Benioff, a relentlessly effective marketer, pioneered the concept that companies could rely on Web applications for what previously had been complicated software programs that resided on corporate computers. Salesforce.com is so successful (and popular with investors) that it's worth $8 billion, a mere 100 times Wall Street's estimated earnings for the company's current fiscal year. The reason Benioff is jazzed about Chatter is that it represents an opportunity for everyone in the corporate world to use Salesforce.com software, not just salespeople. Chatter gives all employees the ability to broadcast and tune in to people in their own company, much in the way the two buzziest social-media sites enable communication among groups of like-minded people and, more specifically, their friends. "Twitter and Facebook have opened the door to the enterprise world to walk through," says Benioff. I saw Benioff Wednesday at his San Francisco office, where a couple of his people — he has lots of them — gave me a demo of Chatter. In short, I was impressed. It allows users to post their corporate activities as well as to choose whose activities in the company they want to follow. The key is that it's a walled garden. You only follow or broadcast to colleagues. In effect, Chatter does what IBM's Lotus Notes and Microsoft's Sharepoint do, only Chatter is far more flexible, and, at the risk of sounding silly, fun. The corporate possibilities are many. People involved in a specific deal can form a group. An embedded Twitter application makes it easy to track comments about competitors — or your own company. Routine business events, like purchasing data, could be posted online, but shared only with employees who have permission to view it. The allure is that all these concepts work within an easy-to-use online tool that's already been around for a decade and has been refined accordingly. I have no idea if customers will cotton to this idea, and, more importantly, if they'll pay. (Existing Salesforce.com users will get Chatter for free. Salesforce.com will try selling a Chatter-for-the-rest-of-us edition for $50 per user per month.) It looked cool to me, though. I tend to squirm at the request LinkedIn makes of me to update my profile with information about what I'm doing. There's no way I'm telling my competitors what I'm doing. Ditto for Facebook, where my "friends" are an assorted lot that may not care about my work. Twitter gives me a way to communicate to strangers, which I appreciate, but I'm going to be guarded in how much I share with that audience. Would I post to a select group of Fortune editors and writers, however, what story I'm pursuing and who my next meeting is with? Might it improve communication for a distributed team whose left hand often doesn't know what the right hand is doing? Absolutely. brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com

To: stockman_scott who wrote (378)	12/4/2009 10:15:04 AM
From: Glenn Petersen	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1685

SPS Commerce, Inc. (proposed stock symbol: SPSC), self-described as a “leading provider of on-demand supply chain management solutions,” has filed a registration statement. The S-1 can be found here: sec.gov From the S-1: Overview We are a leading provider of on-demand supply chain management solutions, providing integration, collaboration, connectivity, visibility and data analytics to thousands of customers worldwide. We provide our solutions through SPSCommerce.net, a hosted software suite that improves the way suppliers, retailers, distributors and other customers manage and fulfill orders. Implementing and maintaining supply chain management software is resource intensive and not a core competency for most businesses. SPSCommerce.net uses pre-built integrations to eliminate the need for on-premise software and support staff, which enables our supplier customers to shorten supply cycle times, optimize inventory levels, reduce costs and satisfy retailer requirements. As of September 30, 2009, we had over 11,000 customers with contracts to pay us monthly fees, which we refer to as recurring revenue customers. We have also generated revenues by providing supply chain management solutions to an additional 24,000 organizations that, together with our recurring revenue customers, we refer to as our customers. Once connected to our platform, our customers often require integrations to new organizations that represent an expansion of our platform and new sources of revenues for us. We deliver our solutions to our customers over the Internet using a Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, model. Our delivery model enables us to offer greater functionality, integration and reliability with less cost and risk than traditional solutions. Our platform features pre-built integrations with 2,700 order management models across 1,300 retailers, grocers and distributors, as well as integrations to over 100 accounting, warehouse management, enterprise resource planning, and packing and shipping applications. Our delivery model leverages our existing integrations across current and new customers. As a result, each integration that we add to SPSCommerce.net makes our platform more appealing to potential customers by increasing the number of pre-built integrations we offer. Furthermore, integrating trading partners to SPSCommerce.net can generate new sales leads from the organizations with which we integrate our customers because those organizations typically have other trading partners who can benefit from our solutions. We systematically pursue these sales leads to convert them into new customers. Nine months ending September 30, 2009 Revenues: $27,765,000 Net earnings (loss): $949,000 Year ending December 31, 2008 Revenues: $30,697,000 Net earnings (loss): ($1,895,000) Year ending December 31, 2007 Revenues: $25,198,000 Net earnings (loss): ($2,156,000) Year ending December 31, 2006 Revenues: $19,859,000 Net earnings (loss): ($1,301,000)