Salesforce.com (News - Alert) has acquired the wonderfully-named DimDim for $31 million in what Salesforce.com officials say is an effort to bolster its Chatter application business.

Chatter is an application that provides social networking and real-time connection features for enterprises. As a recent assessment from the Trefis team says, "while the Chatter collaboration network constitutes less than four percent of our estimate for Salesforce.com stock, the impact this product could have on other aspects of the business does provide real upside for the company."

Salesforce.com could use Chatter to expand its enterprise customer base and up-sell its more valuable cloud-based products like its customer relationship management or computing software. Salesforce.com competes with SAP, Oracle , Microsoft (News - Alert) and IBM in the CRM software market.

"Our price estimate for Salesforce.com stock stands at $128, which is about 10 percent below market price," Trefis says. "As Chatter individually generates less than 4 percent of our price estimate for the company, cloud-based customer software (63 percent) and cloud computing (26 percent) remain the largest value contributors for Salesforce.com."

According to Trefis, Chatter is "a cloud-based social collaboration application through which enterprise users can create profiles with professional information like personal contact data, area of expertise, and work history. Users can also share business documents and post status updates on individual documents and applications, as well as form discussion groups."

The advantage that Chatter has over other social networking sites like Facebook and Google (News - Alert) Buzz is that it provides additional security and privacy features.

Last week TMC had the news? that ? ISL (News - Alert) Online has published on its blog that its online collaboration application ISL Groop is "a perfect alternative, as it allows DimDim SaaS Subscribers to continue meeting online. ISL Online even offers a prolonged free trial until the expiry date of a valid DimDim subscription."

ISL Online has been supplying on-demand business software for remote desktop support and access, web meetings and instant live chats since 2003 to over 90,000 business users worldwide which establish more than 5 million session per year. ISL Groop is their software for online meetings, live webinars, e-learning and web collaboration. "It is an ideal alternative for DimDim as it allows users all over the world to communicate via the integrated VoIP and video, work on shared documents or even share their desktop," company officials say.