With so many blog, wiki, and social networking applications--some authorized and some not--finding their way into enterprises these days, CIOs are under increasing pressure to bring these social computing "rat nests" under some kind of formal IT control by integrating them into the enterprise system. For Jive Software, the most influential software company you may never have heard of, this is the sound of opportunity knocking...again.
Launched in New York in 2001 by a couple of University of Iowa Java wizards named Matt Tucker and Bill Lynch--soon joined by CEO David Hersh--Jive quickly became the group discussion application of choice for large online communities at Sun, Amazon, Apple and many other sites with millions of users.
Tucker and Lynch had realized early on that none of the free PHP forum software had enough cache capacity to handle that kind of traffic so they created their initial application, Jive Forums, as an open source, enterprise solution, using 100% Java, tweaked for maximum caching. That proved to be a key differentiator. Today, Jive Forums powers many of the largest online communities throughout the world, including the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and ships as a standard part of SAP NetWeaver.
In 2004, after their significant others had finished up with grad school in New York, Tucker, Lynch and Hersh packed up the company and moved to Portland, Oregon where labor and overhead was a lot cheaper. The move cost the company a little momentum, but you'd hardly know it--it has been growing like gangbusters ever since. Jive Software ranked 443 on Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest growing private companies last year. Jive now has 50 employees, 1,600 customers, and expects to do about $15 million in revenues this year, according to Hersh. And all this without a penny of outside investment.
And things could get even better as the call for order in the collaboration space increases. Jive's response to the growing enterprise demand to bring all their social software into a unified system is a new collaboration platform called Clearspace, (released in February and already in Version 1.1) that unifies all content tools (whether or not they were made by Jive) using an open, plug-in architecture, that emphasizes real-time communication. For users, Clearspace presents a unified portal-view to content from all over an enterprise. Relationship mapping directs users to content that has changed by topic, not by application. Rather than going through a lot of blogs or wikis to find out if anyone has been discussing something they're interested in, they can look at a category and see if anyone has written a post, IM, or document on the subject. They don't even need to know where to look, since communities are defined by categories, not types of applications.
Beyond providing a unified view of the content being created anywhere in the enterprise, Clearspace also contains its own impressive tool kit that allows collaborative document creation in the form of wiki-style pages; activity management; blogs; document management; threaded discussions; and content syndication. Users can also create dynamically configured workspaces, which can be restricted or open for use with partners and customers.
For enterprises that have already invested in other legacy solutions that are working well, Clearspace's open architecture allows them to hang on to applications that people are already comfortable using. And just last week (May 14), Jive released Clearspace X, an application that allows companies to build communities with customers and partners by pushing out content they want to share.
"Our goal is to bridge the gap between the big, expensive and complex collaboration systems like Sharepoint and the sort of enterprise IT chaos and inefficiency that results from having a bunch of unconnected point-solutions," Hersh says. "You don't have to go the Microsoft or Lotus route to achieve the benefits of collaboration. You just need a secure, reliable way to tie all the pieces together and to expose the content and connections to users who need it. Clearspace does exactly that."
Jive appears to be following the same "bridge the gap" model with Openfire, its XMPP-based (Jabber) communication RTC server which now has more than a million users and is widely considered to be a less expensive, less complicated alternative to Microsoft's Live Communication Server and Lotus Sametime. Formerly called Wildfire and developed as a cross-platform open source project, the new enterprise edition (introduced in March) adds voice capabilities to the popular IM platform. Users can now talk from one PC to another while sharing screens, participating in discussion threads, and sending instant messages
For all the impressive technology, Hersh says he thinks Jive's most important asset may be the experience it has developed over the past six years in working with many large organizations and IT departments.
"We've been put through the wringer many times," he says. "There are a lot of companies jumping into the collaboration software space right now but we've been out there for a long time now and we have the products and the experience to create real business value."
