Twitter Turns Its Tweet Firehose On For Saleforce's Radian6 In New Enterprise Deal
As enterprise companies like Salesforce and Oracle continue to sharpen their social media services for enterprises, Twitter is locking arms with one of them in a strategic alliance.
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal formalizes what had been building since March 2011, when Salesforce debuted its socially rebuilt Service Cloud 3 with Chatter, Facebook and Twitter integrations. What changed on June 13, 2012 is the depth of access: Radian6 moves from API-level tweets to the full firehose, every public tweet in real time, under a confirmed strategic alliance.
The story traveled to AllThingsD on both sides of the Atlantic pickup, a sign that enterprise social media had become a two-horse framing: Salesforce allied with Twitter while Oracle sharpens its own competing social services for enterprise customers.
First-order effects
- Salesforce's Radian6 immediately gains a data advantage over rival social-monitoring tools: full-firehose access means its enterprise customers see the complete public conversation rather than a sampled stream.
- Twitter converts its firehose from an infrastructure cost into a direct revenue line with one of the largest enterprise software vendors.
Second-order effects
- Oracle and other enterprise-suite rivals are pushed to secure equivalent data-access deals of their own or concede ground on social listening, since sampling quality becomes a selling point in CRM pitches.
- Pricing power over real-time social data concentrates with Twitter, which can now charge strategic partners selectively instead of licensing the firehose broadly.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, control of raw social data becomes the structural moat in enterprise social software: platforms that own the firehose sit above the analytics vendors, deciding who competes at all.
- Alliances like this point toward enterprise social suites consolidating around a few platform-data pairings, raising barriers for independent monitoring firms that lack a direct feed.
The trend: Real-time social data access is becoming a licensed, partner-gated asset that determines which enterprise software vendors can compete in social CRM at all.