It's been a thoroughly enjoyable couple weeks as we've gotten to preview Jive SBS 4.0 to a handful of customers from a variety of industries. Always fun to showcase the new stuff, especially when they dig it. And they did. If this were a movie we had to promote, we would have no shortage of those pithy quotes to use ("A non-stop tour de force", "Ice Cube's Best Work!"). In our case, the quotes were things like "jaw-dropping" and "awesome." Here's a real quick summary:

Going Deep: Having been a part of so many major customer rollouts over the last few years, it was clear that we needed to go deeper into our customer's work lives.  This paved the way for our integration with Microsoft Office and SharePoint.

Going Out: Social media monitoring has become an incredibly important activity for businesses, but they've had no way to distribute or collaborate on the insights / analytics. Enter the Jive Market Engagement Solution, now integrated into 4.0. SBS + SMM = Faster, better decisions at the moment of pain or opportunity.

Going Wide: So many of our customers now are working outside the firewall with customers and partners, that they need a way to bridge the firewall and pull all the pieces together. Jive Bridging takes this concept to a level never achieved before.

Going on the Road: Mobile. Can't ignore it. It's a part of everything we do these days. So we developed a iPhone app (an information addict's dream) and better tools for working from a Blackberry

This is a huge release for us and we're thrilled with it. I'll let you judge for yourself though, and hopefully you'll have your own pithy quotes.

To our customers – thank you for your enthusiasm, creativity and partnership.  To my fellow Jivers – thanks for the hard work, and tenacity.  This is just the beginning.

With the magnitude of the Jive SBS 4.0 release, jive bloggers decided to team up on the news and split it into digestible pieces. In this series of posts, we delve deep into the new mobile tools, bridging public and private realms together, deep Microsoft Office integration, and provide a high level perspective of Jive SBS 4.0.

Bill Lynch on Jive Connects for Microsoft Office

David Greenberg on Jive Bridging

Dave

We at Jive are obviously a bit biased, but we are big believers in the idea of “community.”  Online communities have the power to connect people, unearth game changing ideas, and give voice to people who otherwise might not be heard.  But despite having drunk the kool-aid, I think anyone who manages an online community will tell you it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.  For many companies, it can sometimes feel as if there is a river of activity and conversations happening, but no easy way to capture the sentiments, ideas and insights in a seamless way that allows the organization to take action on what they learn.

That’s why our customers are so excited about the Jive Bridging module in 4.0. In just a few clicks, you can capture a conversation happening in the community and begin socializing it within the organization – behind the firewall – gathering input and feedback almost instantly, and then providing a response just as easily. This is going WAY beyond what others have been promising with  Social CRM.

With the magnitude of the Jive SBS 4.0 release, jive bloggers decided to team up on the news and split it into digestible pieces. In this series of posts, we delve deep into the new mobile tools, bridging public and private realms together, deep Microsoft Office integration, and provide a high level perspective of Jive SBS 4.0.

Dave Hersh on Jive SBS 4.0

Bill Lynch on Jive Connects for Microsoft Office

I have some exciting news to share about Jive, and I also want to give a review of the past quarter to give a measure of our progress.

We just closed our Series B funding round with our VC partner, Sequoia Capital who invested an additional $12 million into Jive. We just issued a press release, and I want to give some additional context on how we will use the funding. There's a very simple four part answer:

1. It's about innovation. We are going to continue to expand the Jive SBS product footprint by dramatically increasing our R&D efforts. We're doing a lot more hiring! In just the last month, we have added 11 new Jivers with 10 more starting in the next two weeks. If you're interested, take a look at our open jobs. We're also going to be pursuing smart acquisitions that complement our portfolio.
2. It's about customers. We will build out our customer-facing teams to further support the success of our clients and to grow the company.
3. It's about partners. We have seen some great success with channel partners and we will be building out that ecosystem to get Jive onto the desktops and mobile devices of more customers. And we'll continue to improve the "partner-friendly" aspects of our application to allow for deep yet hassle-free customization and integration.
4. It's about championing SBS. Jive has built a great community around SBS in the last few years, and we want to continue to spread that gospel. I'm happy when I see new customers say, “I never knew I could do that!” But I'm even happier when I hear them say, "This has changed how I work, and I want more."

Looking at Q3, we had another great quarter and again achieved a record for quarterly revenue, with more than 100% growth compared to Q3 of 2008. We added a number of new customers and a number of existing customers expanded their deployments. Our services team continued their outstanding track record of delivering customer success. And we had some great news in the government sector.

But that only tells half the story. Suffice it to say that Jive is in the midst of the greatest period of product innovation in the company's history. We have recently and will soon deliver new products that will push the envelope on what people think Social Business Software can do.

More to come very soon.

If you've ever been involved in planning or producing a major public event, you can probably relate to the “all hands on deck” call that goes out in the 30  days prior to the event.  There are often hundreds of  "to do's" as the clock clicks down to showtime.

Fortunately, we crossed off one of the big "to do's" over the weekend when we tallied up the registrations for JiveWorld09 and realized the conference is sold out!  We announced this in a press release today, and I wanted to share some additional comments today in  JiveTalks.

Before I continue, a huge THANK YOU to Jive customers, prospective customers  and partners from all of us at Jive! In the year of the "non-conference" - and  in an environment where every travel dollar is scrutinized - we appreciate this  incredible vote of confidence. We’ve had customers tell us their budgets  restricted them to only one event this year – and they chose ours. That has  everyone on Team Jive even more motivated to deliver a high-impact  program that arms conference participants with the information they need to move  even more aggressively with their Social Business Software  agenda.

We’ve started a waiting list because there’s always the possibility that someone who previously registered won’t be able to join us. If you’re interested in attending JiveWorld09 and didn’t register, I encourage you to add your name to this list as soon as possible. We’ll start at the top and work our way down when we have an open slot.  We’ll also be providing select conference materials through the JiveWorld09 community site.

And if you can’t join us in person this year, you can still participate in video form. Check out the contest we’re holding and share what it means personally to you and your organization to “Jive Together.”  Entries will be shown during the conference as a video mashup.

We’re in the midst of announcing some of the most significant innovation to ever come out of Jive, and we’re just beginning. We’ll have much more to share at JiveWorld09, and I predict it will provide even more inspiration to lead a Social Business Software revolution in your organization.

How was your summer?

As the newest member of Jive's executive team, I spent a good part of my summer Jiving with our incredible customers: a powerful, forward-thinking community that's leading the global shift toward a social business mandate. And I have to share an "ah-hah" moment I had from those conversations: our customers don't just work inside Jive, they love Jive! There's a passion for Jive unlike any other software solution I've been associated with.

And it's really showing up in the traction we're getting for our inaugural community conference: JiveWorld09. Registration is so strong, so early, that we'll most likely be ending registrations next week - a full month before the conference. I'm not complaining, mind you!  In the year of the "non-conference" I'm thrilled our customers are making an exception to tight travel budgets and taking time away from the office to join us in San Francisco.

I'm sure it helps that this not your run-of-the-mill conference around a run-of-the-mill product - and that this is the first opportunity you and your fellow Jivers have had a chance to come together. Just wait until you see who's going to be there: we have a jaw-dropping roster of Jive customers participating as speakers and panelists.

Working inside Jive takes a variety of forms, and we're holding a video contest to encourage our customers to share what it means personally to them and their organization to “Jive Together.” The results will be shown at JiveWorld09 as video mashups and, from what I've seen to date it's nothing short of amazing how innovative our customers are.

If you're still on the fence on attending - perhaps still sifting through a backlog of to do's from your summer - please do register sooner rather than later!

BTW, you may have seen the recent blog post that Jive's CEO - Dave Hersh - and his family are moving to the Bay Area. On behalf of the small (but energetic) group of Bay Area Jivers,we'd like to welcome Dave and his family to the Golden State. We look forward tohaving them - and their discretionary income - help us chip away at California's budget deficit.

As Jive’s CMO, I have the privilege of blogging about our newest offering, the Jive Market Engagement Solution. I'm confident this solution is going to rock the world of marketers everywhere!

Usually we blog on a new product concurrent with issuing the press release announcing that product. However, in the final moments Monday of preparing the news for release, my time was focused on another developing story at Jive: our first community conference – JiveWorld09 – is on the verge of a sell out!

Now that we’ve creatively added more capacity to JiveWorld, I’d like to share some thoughts about yesterday's announcement and why I'm so excited.

First, the facts: our Market Engagement Solution is a new product that combines the power of buzz monitoring with Jive Social Business Software (SBS). We’ve selected Radian6 – a leading social media monitoring platform for understanding "the big conversation" occurring in the social web – and tightly fused it with Jive SBS. Marketers bring observations from Radian6 into a “Market Space,” a new element of Jive SBS. There, marketers add other observations – perhaps a tweet or blog post – and socialize those observations with colleagues. Think of it as our version of the "War Room," where the right people come together at a moment’s notice. Once a plan of attack is established, actionable Viewpoints are published to help organizations move faster in the moment of pain or opportunity.

And because the solution is available via the cloud, there’s no need to wait behind other initiatives for IT resources.

The time is now for this approach as marketers are in a lather about the increasing velocity of social conversations and are struggling to stay on top of those conversations. When we were preparing for press interviews - more on the market reaction in a moment - our PR team reminded me of the classic I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel go to work in a candy factory. They manage at first, but you're probably smiling now as you remember how quickly they were buried in a speeding conveyer belt of chocolates. Like Lucy and Ethel, marketers are getting buried in alerts and “helpful” heads-up emails as yet another co-worker asks “I saw some customers twittering that they are dying to have feature X in the product. Should we do it?” And as those emails circulate throughout an organization, people are reminded that “Reply All” is not effective for collaborating on a firestorm or real-time, online sentiment.

At Jive, we are electrified by the responses we’re getting from customers, and the market reaction has been equally electrifying:

• Susan Scrupski writes “The Jive Market Engagement announcement is the first Enterprise 2.0 announcement of its kind blending traditional social media monitoring and measurement with a leading enterprise social computing platform.”
  
• Jeremiah Owyang and R “Ray” Wang commented “Jive’s offering is really a customer relationship module in disguise, yet because of the web-based offering marketing can implement this pseudo-CRM solution without involving IT.”
  
• In his Collaboration 2.0 blog, Oliver Marks begins his analysis with the provocative headline “How Kanye West influences enterprise social business strategy.”

For more reactions, please see our News section.

As always, thanks for taking time today to Jive with us. If you haven’t already done so, please register now for JiveWorld. Even though we increased capacity, we’re still limited in the number of additional registrations we can accept and we don’t you want to miss out on seeing Jive's Market Engagement Solution – and all the other powerful capabilities of Jive SBS – up close and personal in San Francisco!

Even though I've been using Jive for over two years, I still have those moments at work when I'm reminded, "Wow, getting this project done/question answered/problem solved would have never been possible if I still worked the way I used to."

At the Jive offices, we all have a better appreciation for what it means to work together. Which is why I am really excited about our video contest, "What Does Jive Together Mean To You?", which we launched last week.

We launched this contest because we plan to do a creative mashup for our inaugural community conference, JiveWorld09, that's taking place in late October. (BTW, have you checked out the amazing agenda and customer sessions lined up?)

What does "Jiving together" mean to the companies and pioneers who are leading the effort to integrate the social web into their business environment? We've left the question open-ended purposely because it has to be.  There are infinite variations to this question depending on industry, company lifecycle, culture and initiatives. And you're invited -- whether or not you can make it to the conference -- to post your video in response to ours. Besides the inspiration we hope our customer EMC and our own video will provide, here are some fun videos people have posted about Facebook and Twitter.

We'd love to have you enter the contest. It's also a chance to win a Flip HD Camcorder (shameless promotional plug ).  So what are you waiting for? Can't wait to see what you dream up.

Are we really in the midst of a market rebound? I'll let my broker figure that one out. But as I look at the market, one thing has become clear to me. A broad cross-section of companies see the window of opportunity -- the potential to change the way they work so they can perform better, no matter the economic conditions. This is why the application of Social Business Software has become much more interesting and strategic as of late. Just look at the Lufthansa and Toshiba announcements we've made in the last few weeks.

But to take advantage of that opening, they know they have to move aggressively and accurately. That's why we are working so hard on new innovations that will expand the Jive offering in exciting ways. It's also why we're investing aggressively in all areas of the company - products, services, sales and marketing. And it's a big reason why there are more and more Jivers around in the U.S. and in Europe. In fact our "new" Bay Area office has expanded so fast that we're opening a bigger one as soon as possible.

On a personal note, my family and I recently recognized another window of opportunity. As I find myself back and forth between Portland and Palo Alto every week, we've decided to move back down to the Bay Area where my wife is from and where we spent many years. And as Jive has continued to expand aggressively, our presence in the Bay Area is becoming a bigger part of our growth (employees, customers, partners, and investors). Portland will remain Jive's physical headquarters -- our Portland team is absolutely incredible and will continue to be a big part of our growth.

Where I live has become less important as I spend a lot of time on the road visiting customers, prospective customers and partners. Jive is a distributed company that is great at working across geographical boundaries - we practice what we preach in a very deep way and use social software to stay connected. Our executive team lives in Portland, California, Phoenix and Texas, and we're hiring the best people we can find wherever they are located. As we like to say, "our real headquarters are in Brewspace" (our internal instance of Jive).

Irrespective of my base of operations, I will be spending significant time in both offices - when I am not traveling elsewhere. And I'll be completing the move soon to try to get our kids into the school year as quickly as possible.

Stay tuned for some exciting things to come from Jive. And to learn everything from the top Jive experts, join us at JiveWorld on October 27-29 in San Francisco.