Some new Salesforce news this week! Salesforce.com has made another acquisition, this time it is fellow Chicago native, Model Metrics. “With Model Metrics, salesforce.com will add mobile and social expertise, allowing the company to further transform customers and empower its global partner ecosystem.” Not too many details about the acquisition have been disclosed; however, we do know the acquisition should come to a close by the end of January 2012.

• Salesforce.com Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Model Metrics

Appirio offers some great insight into salesforce.com’s newest acquisition. First and foremost, it highlights how important the cloud and the social enterprise are to enterprises. With Model Metrics, “Salesforce will be able to make the social enterprise vision tangible for customers.” Secondly, it will grab new customers who are hesitant towards the social enterprise and allow them to “see their future” as they adopt the social enterprise. Lastly, Appirio brings up the valid point that this acquisition removes “one of the leading service competitors from the ecosystem,” and possibly opening up new opportunities for other Salesforce partners.

• Salesforce Buys Model Metrics- What Does it Mean?

Cloud Tweaks offers a fun list of new ways to use cloud computing. Need to get your dog licensed in Europe? Take it to the cloud. Want to compare chocolate chip cookies in New York? Serious Eats can do that for you. Want to play Mahjong in your free time? Well, there’s a cloud app for that, too.

• Top 5 Fresh New Ways to Use Cloud Computing

Infrastructure professionals will soon need to wake up and smell the cloud. It is important now than ever before to embrace the cloud and adapt to this new model; the cloud is efficient, fast, and cost effective, and cutting down on costs will help with the growth of any company. There are various cloud alternatives for companies to take advantage of, and infrastructure professionals and IT need to begin looking into them.

• Who’s Afraid of the Cloud?

One neat little aspect of Salesforce’s Winter ’12 release is Social Contacts. Basically, when you enable Social Contacts, you will have social media buttons at the top of every contact’s page. Salesforce searches for that name in Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, so you can see their social media pages without having to leave salesforce.com. The issue, however, is that not everyone in Twitter uses their name as their Twitter handle, and not everyone has public search enabled on their Facebook pages. As a fix, make sure you check out your privacy settings on Facebook (the post tells you how to do so) to make sure you are searchable and findable. For that Twitter fix, well, there really isn’t one, so you’ll just have to manually search for your contact’s Twitter pages (but don’t worry, Salesforce allows you to do this within salesforce.com, too).

• Facebook Settings and Social Contacts in Salesforce

Jim Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, announced today that the United States Intelligence Community will now use cloud computing to meet budget reduction cuts. “The biggest portion of those cuts, spread across 20 years, will come from anything labeled information technology… cloud computing makes possible much of those savings.” The Director of National Security Agency followed this announcement and stated that NSA operations will be moving to the cloud by the end of this year as well. Cloud computing will provide 30 to 40 percent savings in the NSA’s IT budget, and in some respects, enables better security. Quite a big step for the advancement of cloud computing.

• It’s Official! US Intelligence Community is Moving to the Cloud

Out of 500 of the largest US companies, salesforce.com ranked in the top 12% in Newsweek’s US Green Rankings. Salesforce.com’s “multi-tenant architecture makes it possible… to have a smaller impact on the environment. More applications running on fewer servers results in lower levels of carbon emissions.” Salesforce.com was placed at number 14 with an overall raking of 91 out of 100.

• Salesforce.com in Top 12% in Newsweek’s US Green Rankings

During Tim O’Reilly’s interview with Marc Benioff, Benioff discussed how important it is for enterprises to embrace social. Customers are all over social networks, and companies need to be interacting with them and following what their customers are saying. If they do not become social, they are going to fall behind. Benioff states, “I really think that Facebook is becoming a vision of what the consumer operating system is,” and hopes that he can one day “be doing as many amazing things as Facebook is.”

• Salesforce CEO: Facebook is Leading the Direction for Where ‘We’re Going as an Industry’

To piggyback off of the previous article, salesforce.com’s Winter ’12 release embraces the Social Enterprise. With the Sales Cloud, you can “sell socially” with the use of Customer Groups, Social Contacts, and Mobile Dashboards. With Chatter, you can build your employee social network through Chatter Connect and Customer Groups. With Data.com (Jigsaw), you have access to 200+ million company records. These three are just the beginning; there is a lot more you can do with Winter ’12, click the link to read about all of the new features.

• Winter ’12 is Here and it’s Social

SMEs now have the opportunity to access enterprise-level services, security and products, but at a fraction of the cost. “The entire procedure is quick to set up and easy to use,” just log in, customize the application, and begin. It is also accessible by anyone and any department in the company at any time, so you don’t have to worry about passing software discs along to different departments. A lot of SMEs worry about security issues, but it’s actually very simple to manage security since all data and applications are centralized in a data center, so no data is stored on the actual device. Cloud computing offers flexibility, scalability, and simplicity, and it’s easier now to get a company going than ever before.

• What SMEs Should Acknowledge about Cloud Computing

You will see a direct correlation between the decline in Delivered Innovation’s blog posting frequency and our participation in conversations on social media properties such as Twitter and Facebook…and it isn’t intentional.  We knew that despite our reluctance to jump into the social media fray, it would happen sooner or later.  But now that it has, it seems like our already frantic pace of processing information has increased by an order of magnitude.  And that has changed our entire approach to communicating.

The problem falls squarely on the shoulders of Twitter…I mean me.  When I was first turned onto the concept of Twitter by a friend that I consider to be an even earlier adopter of technology than myself, I thought it was the most asinine idea I had heard of, even after having lived in San Francisco and hearing some outrageous pitches during the dot com bust.  But then a funny thing happened…our sales and ops director Ed came onboard, we starting working on our obligatory “social media strategy,” and we both got sucked into the Twitter stream.  And even though we’re not exactly the next Robert Scobel when it comes to Tweet frequency, I have noticed that using Twitter has forced me to embrace brevity – something that had been a sort of Achilles’ Heel of mine in the past – and as an unintended consequence, has limited my attention span to the point where writing a blog post seemed like it was the equivalent of writing a 400-page novel.  Just a bizarre feeling…it makes me wonder how the real time stream is changing our brains, our social behavior, and the English language.

What are your thoughts?  Has Twitter limited our attention span?  How quickly does information lose value in our real-time reality? Will patterns emerge in the stream that architects like myself can recognize and apply to business challenges?  It’s all fascinating.

Mike