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Category: Jive

Jive: Goodbye Clearspace, Hello Social Business Software

Rick Turoczy on March 9, 2009

Jive SoftwarePortland-based Jive Software has been relatively quiet as of late. And that generally leads me to assume that they’re working on something new, but I didn’t really have much to go on as to what that might be.

Today, it all became much less clear. (Pun intended.)

Jive has announced that—for their newest release—they have abandoned the distinct Clearspace products in favor of launching a suite of tools entitled “Social Business Software.” And I’m sure it’s no accident that it just happens to be “version 3.0.”

Jive CEO Dave Hersh describes this new offering as the first new application category in business since CRM:

For our customers, SBS is the new enterprise category. The enterprise has been devoid of a new application category since CRM, and they see the advent of social software as the biggest change to happen to the enterprise in fifteen years. It’s now spanning every major vertical and the visionary leaders are seeing the gains that can be made by opening up collaboration and focusing on the people. This is especially true in a downturn, where throwing more money at business process software is not going to lead to huge value increases — you have to look to the areas where there is the most to gain, the white spaces in a company: the people.

Few companies have had the foresight of Jive to understand that—due to both external and internal forces—corporations would be dragged kicking and screaming into becoming much more social beings. This gives them an edge on insight, but they still have several goliath competitors with whom they compete, namely Microsoft and IBM.

Now, Jive is hoping to deliver the platform that helps enable this growing corporate predilection toward more social business management.

Jive marketechture

How is the market reacting to the news?

While there hasn’t been much from the enterprise-focused pubs yet, the tech blogs have taken a gander at Jive’s Social Business Software. Here’s what they had to say:

Jive’s Social Business Software makes collaboration easier (VentureBeat)

“With the downturn, you might assume that Jive was part of a fad that has passed…. But after talking to Chief Marketing Officer Lawrence, it sounds like that would be a mistake—Jive added 200 customers last year, bringing its total to more than 2,500, and many of those newer customers are paying for more expensive tools, so its revenue actually grew 70 percent. In fact, Lawrence says Jive is hiring. And a recent report from Forrester identified Jive and Telligent as the leaders in the ‘community platforms’ market.”

Jive Launches All-In-One Social Enterprise Software (TechCrunchIT)

“Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, the software combines computing with social collaboration. The Clearspace app helps businesses hold collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more. The Clearspace Community app provides a platform that allows businesses to communicate effectively with customers and the broader community.”

Jive Rolls Out New Product, Takes on Microsoft and IBM in Social Business Software (xconomy)

“‘Enterprise software has been a boring category for 20 years, and Jive is here to change that,’ says Sam Lawrence, Jive’s chief marketing officer.

“You’d expect to hear something like that from an experienced marketer like Lawrence. Yet in this case, he is talking about a bold strategic move by a small company that has its sights set on becoming something like Facebook for the office, putting it on a competitive collision course with Microsoft, IBM, and a slew of startups that aim to help employees get better at collaborating. Jive has evolved to this point from its founding in 2001, before the days of social networking. Its early forays into social software involved online forums and instant messaging, and were focused on support— things like getting customers to help each other rather than call a company with time-consuming questions.”

Jive Updates Enterprise Social Networking (eWeek)

“IBM’s Lotus Connections, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other players are approaching enterprise social-networking, but Jive Software wants to take some market-share of its own with its Social Business Software (SBS) platform. Jive claims that its software’s collaboration and profile features could make it ‘Facebook for the enterprise.'”

Jive Goes Bigger (Than Ever) (ITSinsider)

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“I’m not sure you can announce your leadership in a category, but that’s what Jive has done with the announcement of its Social Business Software application suite—Jive SBS 3.0. The product does bring a deliberate focus to the logical organizational interests of a social enterprise– namely, Employee Engagement, Marketing & Sales, Customer Support, and Innovation. With that segmentation, along with an overhaul of its Jive Clearspace 2.5 released last summer, the software has been reborn—perhaps in the original image of its founders, according to Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer. With this new release, Jive is stridently targeting IBM and Microsoft customers with what could prove to be a superior solution.”

New Jive Offering: Clearspace becomes ‘SBS (ZDNet)

“From origins as a forums and instant messenger vendor, Jive launched ‘Clearspace‘, a single application with wikis, blog, discussions, instant messaging, rss, email integration and files into spaces organized by topic in 2006. This in turn morphed into internal (’Clearspace’) and external (’Clearspace Community’) focused versions.

Jive have now taken the industry segment phrase to rename Clearspace ‘Social Business Software’ (SBS), and are making a play as an enterprise class, company wide backbone for all facets of business collaboration.”

Jive unveils new social media business tools (Silicon Forest/The Oregonian)

“The concept is fascinating — Jive’s software uses a social networking interface to draw in and connect a company’s employees with one another, and with customers. At first blush it looks like Facebook, a format Jive hopes will help engage companies’ younger employees….

“Dave and the folks who started Jive, Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker, had lots of other thoughtful things to say about Jive’s outlook and Portland’s startup scene. I’ll have more on that, and more from them, in an upcoming article.”

What’s next?

Jive will be rolling out the new Social Business Software suite next week—but existing customer already have access. It will be interesting to see what kind of reception this latest iteration of Jive’s tools receives. Here’s hoping they get a positive response from both current customers and those potential customers waiting in the wings.

For more information on the latest release, visit Jive Social Business Software.

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Jive Software hires McCracken as Senior Vice President of Sales, Lanfri joins Board

Rick Turoczy on January 12, 2009

Jive SoftwarePortland-based Jive Software recently announced that they have hired John McCracken as Senior Vice President of Sales. McCracken comes to Jive most recently from Inovis, a maker of supply chain management solutions. Prior to Inovis, he worked for Jive board member Tony Zingale at Mercury Interactive. Mercury was acquired by HP in 2006.

Jive CEO Dave Hersh says, “John is a hugely talented sales leader who has worked with most of our other execs during his time at Mercury.”

The company has also announced that Bill Lanfri has joined its Board. According to his bio:

Some of his more recent experience includes Operating Partner at Accel Partners from 2000 – 2003, during which time he served as CEO of the Accel / Sequoia investment Big Bear Networks from 2000 to 2001. Before joining Accel, he served in 1998 and 1999 as CEO of Avanex Corporation (NASDAQ: AVNX). Prior to Avanex, he was a founding investor and key advisor to RedBack Networks (NASDAQ: RBAK). He has served on numerous boards in both advisory and initial funding capacities, including network security company Network Alchemy, acquired by Nokia Corporation in early 2000.

For more on Jive’s leadership, see the bios of the management team and the Board.

[Updated] Sadly Jive Software layoffs confirmed

Rick Turoczy on October 14, 2008

[UPDATE 4] Portland Business Journal “Jive layoffs are ‘market response'”

[UPDATE 3] Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian talks to Sam Lawrence about the layoffs.

[UPDATE 2] Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer at Jive, via Twitter:

Jive cost reduction via Sam Lawrence on Twitter

[UPDATE] Chris Kalani provides insight, confirming that there were layoffs today at Jive.

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but in this case, I feel an obligation to report it.

I’ve been hearing rumors about Jive Software for a few weeks now. Enough so that I’ve asked for comment from Jive on what’s going down.

They haven’t been at liberty to respond. So I haven’t written anything.

Well, I just wanted to let you know that the rumors have escalated exponentially today.

Something is going down. And it doesn’t appear to be good. But I can’t confirm that.

I’ll let you know when I hear more. Again, I’m not looking to further the rumors, but there’s too much activity for this to be a coincidence.

If you have any insight, it would be appreciated.

In the meantime, I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for the folks at Jive.

Clearspace 2.5: Jive raises the bar

Rick Turoczy on August 18, 2008

Jive SoftwarePortland-based Jive Software—which VentureBeat dubs “one of the more successful startups offering collaborative software to large corporations”—has announced the latest release of its Clearspace product, Clearspace 2.5.

It’s a release that marks a decided step forward for one of the darlings of the Portland startup community.

In my opinion, it’s always a smart move to “let people work where they’re comfortable” while providing tools that extract and share data with the enterprise as a whole. Clearspace 2.5 does this in spades, ensuring that Clearspace has a more deeply integrated position among a number of traditional enterprise communications tools.

Just as important, the release marks a decided move from Clearspace as a tangential and “nice to have” social media service to the role of aggregator and “nerve center” for all communications within the enterprise. A role which Jive’s CMO, Sam Lawrence, describes as moving from a presence in the organization to full-fledged “ubiquity.”

But what exactly does that mean? Well, let’s let Jive tell it:

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According to VentureBeat, these seemingly straightforward improvements are all the more powerful in combination:

None of the features are all that innovative on their own, but collectively they mark a smart move forward. For one thing, users can now participate in discussions, check updates and more via text message or email, so Clearspace becomes more accessible and useful outside the office. In addition, Clearspace now integrates with customer relationship manage (CRM) service Salesforce.com, so a Salesforce customer account page can show relevant activity and information from within Clearspace. Finally, it’s now much easier to enable Clearspace-managed customer comments on any webpage by just adding a few lines of code.

And well-known social media proponent Chris Brogan sees the new Clearspace features as a way to weave social media into the workings of the enterprise:

We have to stop thinking of social software as an island. It’s going to be part of the fabric, and that requires integration points, connectivity to the way people create business processes, and flexible enough to fit within an organization’s existing business styles. I saw lots of that in Jive’s latest release, and Sam talked about the company’s further efforts in that department for future visions.

I know the Jive team—quiet as they have been—has been very much “heads down” working on this release. And, as a testament to that focus, they’ve released some very impressive features. What’s more, those features definitely embed Jive’s products more deeply into the enterprise environment.

Hopefully—for Jive’s sake and for Portland’s sake—we’ll see some forward thinking organizations jump at the chance to have this kind of social media interactivity behind the corporate walls, informing the actions of the employees. I’d like to think it could happen. And I hope it happens sooner rather than later.

For more on the features of Clearspace 2.5, see Sam Lawrence’s post on Go Big Always. For more on the company and its products, visit Jive Software.

[Update] Oopie. Apparently I beat Jive to the punch on posting on their own product. Here’s the official Jive post on the Clearspace 2.5 release.

Jive Software introduces Clearstep, an online community for social and Enterprise 2.0 folks

Rick Turoczy on July 30, 2008

Jive ClearstepPortland-based Jive Software has been a bit quiet as of late. Which is always a good sign that folks are up to something.

Part of that “something” was clearly their move to a new office space. And this morning, we discovered another part of that something in the form of a new offering, Clearstep:

Clearstep is the first of its kind online community, powered by Jive’s own Clearspace product, for social and enterprise 2.0 practitioners. Now these professionals have a place to interact, share best practices, and gain access to a much wider range of perspectives on common community and collaboration issues. Clearstep is intended for all social and enterprise 2.0-focused professionals, including Jive customers.

Gia Lyons, Jive’s Director of Social Enterprise Evangelism… Um. I’m sorry. Where was I? Oh yes, Gia Lyons describes Clearstep as the “best business hook-up hotspot”:

Ever wish you could find someone working on social media or Enterprise 2.0 efforts at other companies, same as you? Wish you could pick their brain about how the heck they justified the implementation cost? Found that elusive ROI? Tricks to get employees to use it? Best way to communicate your new online community to your brand fanbase?

The fringe benefits for Jive hosting the site are immediately evident. Not only do they get a bunch of leading social media specialists talking it up about enterprise adoption of social media in Jive’s backyard, they also get those experts having that conversation while using Jive’s product.

Which, aesthetically, I might add—thanks to the work of Michael Sigler and his design team (specifically Chris Kalani)—is one of the most beautiful corporate Web apps around.

Jive Clearstep

It’s an interesting experiment, to be sure. But the question for me remains: Do people involved in social media experts—especially those within the enterprise—like talking to one another as much as they like talking to non-expert social media types? That remains to be seen.

[Update] Gia Lyons was kind enough to stop by and clarify this point. The community is actually for everyone—not “experts” as I had incorrectly concluded. So this truly becomes a social network focused on social media, open to anyone who is interested in participating. Obviously, the community was seeded with experts because, well, I mean who else would you seed it with?

Interested in participating in the Clearstep community?

If you are someone interested in social media expert pursing that ever elusive “Enterprise 2.0” and Clearstep has sparked your interest, why not consider joining the community and giving it a test drive? Clearstep registration is currently open. Jive has done a great job of seeding the community, pre-launch, so that there is plenty of existing content in which you can root around.

For more information, see the Jive press release announcing Clearstep, Jive’s numbers, and recent hires.

Want some time with Forrester’s Charlene Li? Internet Strategy Forum, Jive give you two opp’s

Rick Turoczy on June 5, 2008

Internet Strategy Forum Summit 2008When it comes to A-listers in social media, Charlene Li of Forrester Research is right up there. So I can totally understand why you’d jump at the chance to spend some time with her.

Well, the good news is that she’ll be coming to Portland. The better news is that you’ll get the chance to spend some time with her—in person and in hardback—but you have to act quickly.

Charlene is going to be speaking on “creating social strategies that work” at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit in Portland on July 17. (So that’s your in-person time.) And, now, Jive Software has offered a free copy of Charlene’s new book, Groundswell, (that’s your hardback time) to the first 250 people to register and attend the event. (You have to be there to get the book.)

Groundswell provides Charlene’s analysis of some of the top corporate uses of social media strategies within and without the “enterprise.”

And for that ever-popular “local flavor”? Groundswell also features Portland’s own Josh Bancroft and his social-media work at Intel.

Who knows? Maybe you could get Charlene and Josh to autograph it for you?

But wait, there’s more

So, you get time with Charlene Li and you get her book for free. What could be better?

How about a discount on your registration fee? Yes? Yes!

Silicon Florist readers are entitled to a 10% discount on their Internet Strategy Forum Summit registration. Simply enter the discount code FLORIST.

That’s a lot of good news for one post. But quite frankly, gentle reader, you deserve it.

The Internet Strategy Forum is a professional association and peer networking group for management with responsibility for driving Internet strategy and implementation from within medium to large client-side organizations across multiple industries. For more on the organization and the summit, visit the Internet Strategy Forum.

Getting your data in and out of the enterprise: Jive joins Data Portability Project

Rick Turoczy on June 3, 2008

Jive SoftwareMuch has been said about you as a user being able to use your data more intelligently—making your data portable—among Web 2.0 properties and social networks. But what about all of that data you’re creating—and own—on the corporate side of the firewall? How do we make that type of data portable?

Well, Portland-based Jive Software may be well on the path to answering that question with today’s announcement that Jive has joined the Data Portability Project.

“The benefits of data portability are not confined to consumer social networks,” said Matt Tucker, CTO, Jive. “Corporate users maintain profiles behind the firewall as well as in external communities and third party platforms, and the ability to simply and securely migrate that information as necessary will be a boon to the IT organizations of tomorrow.”

I hear you. “Data port-uh-what?” Let’s step back.

What is Data Portability?

According to the Data Portability Project, “Data Portability is the option to use your personal data between trusted applications and vendors.”

Heretofore, those “applications and vendors” have dealt with data that resided in the public space with companies like Digg, Drupal, Facebook, Flickr (and by association Yahoo!), Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netvibes, Plaxo, Six Apart, Corvallis-based Strands, and Twitter.

Porting the data relies on standardized and publicly accessible means of transferring that data from service to service, which enables one service to “listen” to another service or “scrape” the data from an existing profile.

To accomplish this, a number of open standards, formats, microformats, and protocols have been established. These include APML, FOAF, hCard, OAuth, OpenID, OPML, RDF, RSS, SIOC, the XHTML Friends Network (XFN), XRI, and XDI.

Okay, I can feel your eyes rolling back in your head. Enough alphabet soup.

What’s the big deal about Jive, a corporate-side technology, joining a group of the cool kids on the social networking scene?

So what?

In my opinion, Jive’s decision to become the first corporate-side technology company to adopt this standard is momentous and game changing.

Why? Because it shakes the very foundation of what businesses think they own.

Today, most any of you on the corporate side of the firewall have signed some form of agreement. It could be a “noncompete” or simply a contract for employment. If you’re an exempt employee, it’s generally pretty strict in terms of what the company owns.

And generally, most companies will take the opportunity to cast a wide net over your work—claiming the company owns the intellectual property for anything you create while you’re employed by the company.

Anything.

That means your IM, your email, your time on Facebook, your tweets, your voice mail, your iTunes playlist… All corporate property.

Seems a bit at odds with the way things are going, doesn’t it?

And as more and more of the “Web 2.0-esque” technologies find their way behind the corporate firewall, it’s going to seem even more and more wrong.

Even today, we’re beginning to see glimmers of the data we’re generating in public beginning to mesh with the type of data we’re generating at work. (LinkedIn anyone?)

The burgeoning workforce who lives and breathes in this brave new world will expect that the data they create is data they own and can move. And this is at direct odds with what the old school corporation thinks that the business should own.

It’s not going to be a pretty battle. But with this announcement, Jive is taking a step in the right direction—siding with the future instead of the past.

So what will enterprise data portability entail?

Honestly, it’s going to take a little while to figure that out. But Jive has started the ball rolling.

Jive’s latest high-profile hire, Gia Lyons, a former IBMer, understands the depth of this undertaking:

Think about all the bits and pieces of your worklife, strewn about all those different systems: HR systems, skills databases, LDAP directories, employee whitepages, LinkedIn, etc. Wouldn’t it be great if you could manage all that personal data from a single spot? It can live where it lives – I would call it data transparency, though, not data portability. This can already be accomplished by using data mapping tools in market today, but it takes some serious customization muscles to pull off, not to mention many lunches and cocktails to woo the czars in charge of all of those internal systems so they play nice.

And Jive CMO Sam Lawrence has grand plans for where this enterprise data portability might have the chance to go:

In the meantime, we’re interested in working with the Data Portability group to help contribute to these standards as well as new ones as well. Hopefully, the organization is now at a point in its evolution to proceed with formal and elected leadership, a standards body, voting process and the rest of the stuff that makes organizations successful.

Again, a vast project with which to grapple, but one whose time has potentially come.

It will be interesting to see where this one goes, and to see watch Portland’s role blossom—as the de facto hub of open source and as a growing proponent of open standards—in this new way of thinking about who owns what.

Jive Software unveils expansion plans

Rick Turoczy on May 28, 2008

Jive SoftwareApparently Portland-based Jive Software has got the “moving into new digs” bug.

I mean, we all know that they’re moving into new offices in Portland, this summer, but now they’ve revealed that they’re planning to move into offices in Silicon Valley, London, and Zurich.

Why all the new offices? Well, there’s a few more heads in the good ol’ headcount it seems. Like more than four times as many. And with all those heads attached to bodies, they need somewhere to sit and work.

This marks a huge step forward for what was—heretofore—a very successful Portland startup. Now that Jive is stepping onto the international stage, it will be very interesting to see what this means for the local scene—and the attention Portland gets.

Stay tuned.

Is Jive CMO Sam Lawrence the next Robert Scoble?

Rick Turoczy on April 11, 2008

Portland-based Jive Software has been all over the blog world as of late with their release of Clearspace 2.0. But that’s not the only place they’re turning heads.

Jive’s Chief Marketing Officer, Sam Lawrence, has rapidly become a social-media phenom on Twitter and on his blog, Go Big Always (which coincidentally uses the same Justin-Kistner designed WordPress theme that adorns Silicon Florist).

Now, Portland’s Marshall Kirkpatrick is hinting that Lawrence may be the next Robert Scoble, given how readily his social media presence jumps to mind:

When we asked for examples of people doing this kind of work well on Twitter, the first name that flooded our replies inbox was Jive Software’s Sam Lawrence.

For those of you unfamiliar with Scoble, Kirkpatrick provides a short and sweet primer:

Robert Scoble blazed a big trail by blogging and producing video as a technical evangelist for Microsoft from 2003 through 2006. No longer at Microsoft, Scoble now produces media for media’s sake at FastCompany.tv. Others have followed his lead, knowingly or not, and job titles like “social media evangelist” are no longer nearly as rare as they used to be.

As for me, I’ve seen the power of Sam’s influence in a variety of media. And it continues to grow on a daily—if not hourly—basis. His bursting on to the social-media scene has been nothing short of explosive. And I continue to be impressed with his growing influence and impact.

That’s good for Jive. But it’s also good for us here in the Silicon Forest.

We could be witnessing the emergence of another true A-Lister, right here in our own backyard. And that, gentle reader, could be huge for the Portland startup scene.

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