The engaging experience offered by smartphone apps has led consumers to prefer interacting with products and services on mobile devices. This has spawned a race among businesses to roll out consumer apps as a competitive tool to improve customer relationships.

Now, companies that have launched consumer apps are also beginning to use business apps to speed up decision-making, raise productivity and leapfrog competitors. …

Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the spat between Oracle and Salesforce at Oracle Openworld this year, Oracle unveiled a public cloud service to strengthen its position in the SaaS market. The world’s second largest software maker also announced significant products that would help companies make better business decisions by making sense of the growing avalanche of corporate data. Here’s a rundown of the key announcements and what they mean for enterprises: …

The growing rivalry between Salesforce.com and Oracle reached a pinnacle this week when Oracle reportedly canned a Salesforce.com keynote at its annual confab.

In a statement today, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Oracle cancelled his Wednesday morning address (U.S. time) at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 held in San Franciso’s Moscone Center. Instead, Benioff will organize a separate session at a nearby restaurant. …

Everybody is looking at social media as the next gold rush.

It’s not surprising, given that social media has moved beyond the consumer space and into the enterprise.

At a press event last week, infrastructure software company TIBCO showed off Tibbr 3.0, an social media platform for enterprises that will be available in August 2011.

Tibbr was launched in January this year after being in development since 2009.

It may be a little bit late to the game though, and gaining mindshare will be difficult as the market is quite crowded.

There are a ton of niche companies who specialize in this space like Yammer and Socialcast.

Not to mention all the big IT companies, who all have solutions or are looking at this space, like IBM (with Connections and Lotus Live) and Microsoft (with Office 365 and Officetalk) and Salesforce.com (with Chatter).

So what makes Tibbr different?

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Barely has Salesforce.com’s social networking tool Chatter been launched — exactly three months since their launch date of Chatter on June 22nd — and they are pushing out Chatter version 2.0 out already.

According to an announcement by Salesforce.com last night, the upgrade consists of a “re-architecture” of all Salesforce.com’s apps to use the social networking capabilities of Chatter.

What you get in the “new” Chatter are more analytics and dashboards, easier ways for users to find conversations, and a desktop-based software version (if you hate using browsers to connect to the web, which is strange for a cloud solution!). Extensions to mobile platforms like Apple’s iOS, Android and Blackberry will be available late this year or early next year.

What’s more interesting, of course, is how Chatter is priced: it’s free for existing users of Salesforce.com CRM or Force.com users, or US$15 per user per month otherwise. Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff touted in the press release that more than 20,000 customers have deployed Chatter (now version 2.0), which is of course a no-brainer: I’m guessing it’s mostly existing customers, and therefore free.

I’m not really surprised that Chatter is free, because it makes sense. If you put a price to it, you’ll be compared to all the free social networking tools out there with a far bigger universe of users (e.g. Facebook or Twitter). Social networking tools is also a great way to defend your turf: Get customers to stick to or recommend others to try the platform. There’s a growing bunch of cloud-based CRM competitors like Zoho and SugarCRM that has followed in the footsteps that Salesforce.com has trailblazed. Salesforce has to keep an eye out on these even as they move on to bigger fish like Microsoft and IBM.

Every good story needs a hero and a villain.

In Salesforce.com’s case, that villain is Microsoft, who is the poster boy for enterprise software.

Or so that is the narrative that Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff wanted to keep forefront and centre during his excellent presentation at the Cloudforce Tour 2 event in Singapore today.

It is a story of how traditional on-premise software behemoths — e.g. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM — are going to have their lunch eaten by nimbler Internet companies who started from the cloud, i.e. the Salesforce.coms, Amazons and Googles of this world.

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The future of business collaboration is in web-based social networks, and software vendors of all stripes are all stampeding to gain mindshare in this space.

For example, IBM has LotusLive, Microsoft has their Azure platform, and Google has Google Apps.

And at a media event today, Salesforce.com folks talked about their upcoming launch of Chatter, yet another Facebook-like social networking collaboration platform, this time for their Salesforce.com customer base.

According to Jeremy Cooper, Asia Pacific’s regional VP for marketing at Salesforce.com, Chatter will be live by the middle of this year. It was announced last year in November 2009, and is currently already available for developers in a private beta. I’ll let their Chatter YouTube video explain what it is all about:

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