Forecast for Jive Social Business Software? Cloudy (and that’s a good thing)

A little over a year ago, Portland-based Jive Software announced that they were relocating to the Federal Reserve building. The decision was both a testament to their success and a signal that they were planning to continue to grow.

But for me, one of the most interesting aspects of their chosen location was their new proximity to a big Internet pipe running through the middle of Portland. Maybe, I mentioned to a few other folks, there was a reason they wanted to be sitting on that pipe. Maybe Jive is looking to deliver their product over the Web. The response? Maybe.

Well, today, that’s a confirmed “Yep,” with the announcement of Jive Express, a version of Jive’s Social Business Software that runs up in the cloud to allow Jive to deliver it as Software as a Service.

With the launch of the product, Jive is offering up to 90-days of the new service completely free:

Qualified users will receive free service for 3 months or until they reach 100 users, whichever comes first. Jive Express costs $3 per month for each user, with a minimum commitment of 100 users. That’s just $300 per month. Jive Express is capped at a maximum of 500 users.

According to Oliver Marks at ZDNet, the idea of getting people on Jive Express to test drive the service is a good one:

The Jive marketing goal is presumably to get people using the system and see the value of it, and this ’suck it and see’ experiential approach will undoubtedly be useful to those in large companies anxious to stop talking about collaboration software and start using it, to demonstrate value to their peers.

For more on the product or to register your organization for a test drive, visit Jive Express.

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Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy