I had the opportunity to catch up with Jive Software several times over the last two weeks, in a meeting with CEO Tony Zingale who recently removed the "interim" from his title, and most of the executive team in Palo Alto, at their Boston launch event last week and at Enterprise 2.0 Conference and Expo. Working through their new messaging and product roadmap, I'm convinced that they are taking a leading position as a social business tool provider. Most of the current offerings in social business software are focused on a small subset of a complete enterprise solution. That's not a criticism, it's a normal evolution in a new software category. Consolidation is often the next step, and we've already seen some of that in this market recently with Lithium's acquisition of Scout Labs and Attensity's acquisition of Biz360. Jive is taking a different strategy and has chosen to use the build + partner approach. During the roadshow they made several announcements and also shared some more color and strategy in my meeting with the team.
Let's start with the partner announcements, then look at the product enhancements and strategy. The partnerships fall into the standard categories, strategic, distribution and system integration / consulting. On the strategic front Jive has licensed the full Twitter Firehose API which provides integration to the full live Twitter stream for monitoring and analysis. To increase its distribution footprint Jive has partnered with Google and CSC. The Google partnership makes the Jive SBS platform available on the Google Apps Marketplace and includes a light version called Jive Express that is offered with a 30 day free trial. CSC, a large Jive customer with ~45K users, is extending its relationship by becoming a VAR and ISV, building apps on the Jive platform. For SI / consulting Jive added two new partners, Isobar and Dachis Group. Isobar is a digital media agency and plans to use Jive SBS to design and deliver branded communities for its clients. The Dachis Group is a consulting / SI organization that focuses on social projects.
From a product perspective Jive is adding capabilities to compliment their SBS platform offering. These offerings range from the basic API level up to user experience. As social solutions become more integrated into the enterprise workflows it will be necessary to integrate the social platform with a wide variety of existing systems. To facilitate this Jive is providing Jive Connect, an API layer with pre-built integrations to specific systems like Exchange, Lotus Notes,. Sharepoint, etc. I posted previously about the need to provide a new user experience for the enterprise that let's employees interact with each other and enterprise resources in an environment that is more web 2.0-like. Several companies have built products based on the activity stream paradigm to address this (and other) needs. Jive's new product is called Jive What Matters, and uses the activity stream paradigm to provide a new UX for the enterprise and adds two key features, Jive Chatter Filter that allow the user to filter content and Jive Genius, an intelligent recommendation engine much like Apple's iTunes Genius to help find relevant social content.
The last announcement that Jive made is sort of product related, in an attempt to jump start their ISV ecosystem Jive is launching the Jive Apps Marketplace. Like other marketplace offerings Jive is working with ISV's and customers to build social apps to enhance and add depth to Jive SBS offered in the Jive Marketplace.
It has been a busy few months for the Jive team and that activity is paying off with significant progress in the social business tools market. Jive has seen strong growth even during last year when most software vendors were struggling. Moving into the social business solutions space with broader products and partnerships is timely and should help them accelerate growth. Jive is private so their actual revenue is not known but rumors and research indicate that they are one of the largest vendors in the social platforms market. There are also rumors of an impending IPO later this year...but rumors are just rumors at this point. Jive is definitely a company to watch in the social business space, especially with its strong and energetic management team driving the strategy.
