Round up: Portland-based Jive Software acquires Boulder-based Filtrbox

Last year, when Sequoia Capital pumped another $12 million into Jive Software’s war chest, one of the first questions out of everyone’s mouth was: What are they going to do with all of that money?

Were they going to hire? Build out? Acquire? Well, apparently they were planning to do a little bit of all of those things. Jive has a bunch of job openings, they’ve been growing—and outgrowing—an office in the valley, and now, they’ve started to pick up some other valuable pieces to their puzzle with today’s news that Jive had acquired social media monitoring company Filtrbox.

It’s an interesting move for Jive, dipping its toe in the water of analysis. It’s immediate—and most obvious—benefit is being able to monitor conversations happening outside the enterprise. But it also holds the potential to be turned inwardly—analyzing the use of Jive, itself, which is—for all intents and purposes—social media. And that would be a smart move for a burgeoning company looking to demonstrate and defend the value of their suite of tools. By giving their customers the means to better assess how Jive is being used within the enterprise. Which, in turn, gives them better data on what’s missing, what’s broken, and what’s working.

So I’m thinking this is a pretty shrewd move. And I’m also thinking what with Webtrends, Iterasi, Clicky, Twitalyzer, Jive and likely some others I’m spacing, Portland may just be gunning to become the—wait for it—de facto hub of social media monitoring.

But that’s just me. How did the social media react to the news? Let’s take a look.

Silicon Forest: Jive Software buys social media monitoring company Filtrbox

Jive’s software uses social media tools to encourage collaboration within a business, and between a company and its customers. The downtown Portland company said it plans to integrate Filtrbox’s technology into Jive’s products to give users access to better information about the social media environment.

ReadWriteWeb: Jive Software Buys Filtrbox: A Purchase All About The Social Web

Jive looked at several companies in the space before deciding to approach Filtrbox. The choice came down to the Filtrbox user experience; its collaboration features; the scalable architecture and the social intelligence baked into the product.

TechCrunch: Jive Software Acquires Social Media Monitoring Startup Filtrbox

Both tech giants and startups are competing to provide enterprise-friendly, social platforms to businesses that combine both collaboration and social media monitoring. Socialtext and CubeTree offer compelling social collaboration offerings to the enterprise. And Salesforce.com recently entered the market with a new, more social version of its Service Cloud, and also debuted its take on a social platform for the enterprise, Chatter. Now Jive Software, a Sequoia-backed company that develops an all-in-one social enterprise software is acquiring Filtrbox, a startup that provides tools for social media monitoring, to boost its offering. You may remember Filtrbox as a Class of 2007 alum of incubator TechStars.

PaidContent: Jive Software Buys Social Media Researcher Filtrbox

In outlining the reasons for its acquisition, Portland, OR-based Jive says it wants to build its business around monitoring social media conversations to give businesses a better sense of how their brands are perceived across sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. By applying Filtrbox’s offerings to its own monitoring software, Jive will craft direct marketing campaigns through those sites and try to alert clients when users’ complaints rise.

PE Hub: Jive Software Buys Filtrbox

Because of their complexity and cost, SMM tools have been confined to a handful of power-users within an organization. Given the increasingly strategic role social web conversations are playing in product development, customer service and support, a broader set of users want and need easy, cost-effective access to social intelligence.

Those are the leading stories for now. But I’ll keep monitoring to see what else turns up.

For more information, see Jive’s information on Filtrbox and the acquisition.