Jive Talks

Announcing 4.0: A Blockbuster Release

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:30:30 GMT

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

Making Microsoft and SBS Jive

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:26:56 GMT

SBS 4.0 is all about closing the gap between the way business tools MAKE people work and the way we WANT to work. And let’s face it, most of us work within Microsoft Office. Jive recently announced a new content management strategy with Microsoft SharePoint integration as a first step. But for SBS to be adopted broadly in enterprises, that social layer has to reach not only across content silos, but also to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the like. So we’re going the next step to integrate with Microsoft Office to help its 600 million users be more social.

As part of the 4.0 announcement this morning, we introduced the Jive Connects for Microsoft Office. This a simple plug-in that allows multiple authors and contributors to make comments and changes on an Office file simultaneously with automatic synchronization of each other's changes. When users create and save Office content, it gets published in their Jive activity stream, which invites comments, discussions, and constructive feedback. Before, users would have to upload the file to Jive then individually download it. With the plug-in, that synchronization to Jive occurs directly from Office.

This eliminates two classic headaches:

Version control: one user can work on the graphics of a PowerPoint presentation while another is working on the script and see changes in the file as they happen. Confusion is eliminated because there is only one synchronized version of a document available to users, which also ensures that everyone is working from the same content.
Reply All as your collaboration tool: it eliminates reliance on email to share and review content by providing a unique Jive URL for every saved document that can be accessed by any user with appropriate access. In fact, non-Office users can preview and provide inline comments to any Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file as well as any PDF.

So for all of us who live in Microsoft Office, things just got a whole lot better.

I'd also like to thank our partner DocVerse who helps power this solution. You can read more at Shan Sinha's blog, DocVerse's CEO.

Dave Hersh on Jive SBS 4.0

David Greenberg on Jive Bridging

Building a Better Bridge for Cross-Community Conversations

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:20:09 GMT

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.

Dave Hersh on Jive SBS 4.0

Bill Lynch on Jive Connects for Microsoft Office

Jive Positioned as a Leader in New Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

chris.morace@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:18:02 GMT

Today at Gartner Symposium the Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace was unveiled, and I feel privileged to share that Jive Software was positioned in the Leaders quadrant. In today's business world the Gartner Magic Quadrant is arguably the most recognized and respected qualitative assessment of a market and its participants. This recognition is particularly meaningful because of the diligence with which Gartner selects leaders by focusing on maturity of offerings, and the vision necessary to continue to lead a market. The process is exhaustingly thorough and involves hundreds of customer conversations, which is why companies across the world rely on Gartner's guidance for selecting vendors. It is without a doubt a privilege and an honor to be recognized in this way.

I'd like to take this opportunity to do three things. The first is to express sincere appreciation to the hundreds of companies who had the vision and foresight to recognize the potential for what Jive Social Business Software could mean to their companies. Enterprises like Kaiser Permanente, United Business Media, Yum!, and Manheim invested in Jive early on and have played an integral part in shaping the direction of our products. They are helping us realize a vision of transforming the way customers, partners, and employees connect with each other to achieve unprecedented results for their businesses.

The second is to pause and reflect on what an amazing moment in time this is for Jive as a company. In what was one of the worst economies in recent history we just wrapped up our 4^th consecutive quarter of record revenues with 100% year over year growth in Q3. We closed a second round of investment from Sequoia Capital who has an unmatched track record of identifying successful technology companies that transform the way we live and work. We are approaching our inaugural users' conference, JiveWorld, that in a year of the non-conference and the un-conference, sold out far in advance and has an incredible line-up of customers speaking about their success. And, we are releasing Jive SBS 4.0 which is easily the largest, most impactful release in our company's history.

And lastly, I would like to reaffirm our commitment to our customers. Being recognized as a leader is an honor, but I know I speak for every Jiver when I say that it just increases the belief, determination, and commitment we bring to work every day. Thank you for helping us grow to this stage and allowing us to do what we love. See you next week at JiveWorld!

(UPDATE: You can now get a complimentary copy of the MQ Report on our Analyst Coverage page)

Some Great News to Share

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:10:26 GMT

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.

What Once Was Lost, Now Is Found

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 08:03:46 GMT

When my kids were toddlers (which was some time ago), they did one thing that always drove me crazy. They would take their coloring books of dinosaurs, princesses, Sponge Bob, or whatever was their latest fancy and attack them with abandon. Scribbles of different colors would go everywhere and bear no resemblance to the underlying outline of said dinosaurs. I would tell them, "try to stay inside the lines....try to make it look like the dinosaur really looked." But my efforts were an exercise in futility. Their only response would be "why?"

I didn't have a good answer for that question -- it just seemed to me like the right thing to do. It only dawned on me many years later that they were acting like people act -- they think creatively, expressively, and outside the lines. I, on the other hand, was thinking like a machine -- neat, orderly, and linear. Did my two decade career in information technology train me to think differently than my genetics told me to?

Of course I'm a big fan of the advancements in work (and life) that computer technology has brought us over the past forty years. However, it’s had a side effect that we’ve all come to just accept as a given. Basically, we as humans have had to conform to how computers work. Unlike machines, we think non-linearly, spatially, and combine knowledge with context – context about the people we’re working with, the history of a particular issue, cultural sensitivities, etc. Computers think in rows and columns – they don't "off road" or venture "outside the lines."

As computers have not been very good with “nuance,” we lost context. For example, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was huge boon to the industry, and completely transformed the efficiency in which we worked with prospects, customers, and partners. But a classic CRM trouble ticket didn’t tell you how really upset the customer was or if their problem was just a minor annoyance. Of course, we then had to compensate for the software's shortcomings – in this case, creating new fields for humans to type in information to share their observations. But this approach still must stay within the machine's structure.

Also, this neat, linear processing of information only reinforced the traditional business hierarchy. Information flows from my employees to me, then to my boss, then to his boss, then to his colleague, back down his employee, etc. Besides not being terribly efficient, it’s counter to way as humans we want to work. People are more like dogs than cats – we’re pack animals, and we thrive on the social context of the way we get things done. That’s our emotional need – it gives us joy to not only accomplish something, but to accomplish it with other people we like, respect, and learn from. The modern age took some of that away from us.

It’s taken decades, but finally computers have caught up to how humans want to work. I’m excited to have joined Jive, as the category of Social Business Software is truly transformative. Although much press is written about the public social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, that’s not the real story. What’s happened is that these public social sites have re-trained the workforce on how to interact – ironically back to the way we we’re more comfortable with anyway. As the power of the intersection of social behavior and technology becomes more self-evident, it is actually businesses that gain the most by harnessing this power.

As proof that this is happening now, this week Jive announced its new strategy to extend a social layer across an enterprise. As part of the strategy, Jive will deliver a series of solutions for content unification to enable organizations to surface content and activities from almost any content management system (CMS) from inside Jive SBS. The first deliverable under the new strategy is the SharePoint Connector which integrates Jive SBS with Microsoft SharePoint. This enables Jive customers to do the bulk of their work in the highly intuitive Jive environment for networking and collaboration without giving up easy access to SharePoint’s powerful content, workflow and portal capabilities. What we have done is essentially taken a mission-critical enterprise application and "socialized it" to make it consistent with the way humans work best.

Communities are built around human interaction, and organizations who build communities both inside and outside their firewall and bridge those together will literally transform the way they serve customers and partners while at the same time unlock expertise and efficiency across their enterprise. Once you’ve taken every part of your business and made it social, you can’t imagine doing it differently. Humans wouldn’t have it any other way.

JiveWorld09 - SOLD OUT!

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:19:07 GMT

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.

XMPP and Web Progress: Google Wave

matt@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:42:32 GMT

At this point, even my dad has asked me what I think about Google Wave (sorry Dad for any tech-savvy intimations!). Since Wave is in the process of rolling out to a much larger audience of testers and developers, it seemed like an appropriate time to jot down some thoughts about it. But first, an announcement: as widely discussed around the web, Wave uses the XMPP protocol under the hood and in particular works with the Openfire XMPP server (see Wave Federation install docs). Openfire was developed by Jive and we continue to sponsor it as an Open Source project. Up to this point, Openfire has been available under the GPL license. We've moved Openfire to the more liberal Apache 2.0 Open Source license, which is the same license used for the Google Wave Federation project. This change is already reflected in the Openfire source tree and an official release will be made soon. We hope and believe that the more liberal Apache 2.0 license will help unleash a new wave of innovation around Openfire (bad pun gleefully intended).

So, Wave itself -- though the project is still in the early stages (and far from ready for prime-time, especially in an enterprise setting) it's generated an enormous amount of buzz. No doubt a large part of that excitement is due to it being from Google. But more importantly, Wave is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in a web browser with a super rich and real-time user experience. It serves as inspiration to all of us that develop collaboration software. While it's still a bit early for Jive to have an official position on Wave, we're definitely following it closely and the Wave concepts align well with our roadmap. So much has been written about Wave already that I won't attempt to duplicate any of the existing detailed overviews. But I do have my personal three favorite things about Wave:

Wave will help drive adoption of HTML 5 by serving as such a compelling example of what that technology makes possible.
Wave uses XMPP as the back-end protocol. Yes, I'm a nerd for loving a protocol.
Federation is baked-in. This was a visionary move by Google and big win for an open internet in the new world of monolithic web sites/services.

It will be fun to watch where all of this goes.

JiveWorld09 - Register NOW to Feel the Love!

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:11:54 GMT

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.

U.S. Congressional Staffers Are Jiving

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:08:02 GMT

This morning the National Journal Group launched 3121, which is powered by Jive. 3121 is a very ambitious project in the public sector – a networking tool designed exclusively for congressional members and staff to help make the legislative process more effective and efficient. Hill staffers can locate and collaborate with colleagues and create personalized news filters using Jive's secure platform.

This news just adds to Jive's momentum in providing secure social solutions for government agencies. Jive SBS already serves as the social collaboration platform at a number of high profile U.S. government projects including the A-Space program, Military Homefront, NASA, and Air Force Medical Service Knowledge Exchange.

My favorite statement about the launch comes from Chris Contakes, chief technology officer of National Journal Group:

"We had two key requirements for the 3121 system: it had to break down the silos that exist between staffers, offices, and chambers, and it had to be secure. Jive is already the Social Business Software standard for several federal departments, and it has an excellent security track record within the U.S. intelligence community. We believe Jive is an excellent choice to help staffers reach new levels of collaboration and cooperation on key legislation."

You can read more about it in Jive's press release on the launch news.

Extending SBS Again - Unveiling Jive Market Engagement!

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:07:13 GMT

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!

Jiving in the Federal Government

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:15:00 GMT

When co-founders Matt Tucker and Bill Lynch started Jive in the dark moments of 2001, they probably couldn’t have imagined that their idea would one day become a trusted solution to government agencies as they tackle some of the big challenges of our time. 8 years later, we’re standing shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. government to bring the power of Social Business Software to the complex task of serving and protecting over 300 million people.

In today’s press release we reference how our work with the U.S. intelligence community, and organizations like NASA, the U.S. Army, Air Force Medical Services is helping to connect the dots – agency to agency, department to department, people to people and system to system. While programs like A-Space have gained the buzz- worthy moniker "Facebook for Spies," for the Defense Intelligence Agency, this is serious business.

Our success speaks to the Federal Government's vision and commitment to following the Presidential call for a more collaborative government. Our success is also a testament to the strength of Jive’s SBS solution, and the security it offers.

But this is only the beginning. Stay tuned!

What Does Jiving Together Mean To You? A Video Contest.

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:11:57 GMT

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.

Can Jive Help Make the Internet Better?

matt@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:56:36 GMT

In a bid to make the internet a better place for web developers, there's been a big effort lately to kill IE 6. My favorite part of the story is Microsoft themselves, with a promise to donate food on behalf of people that upgrade from IE6 to IE8:

Our UI team regularly curses the large set of workarounds and compromises that IE6 support forces on them. Such is the reality of being an enterprise software vendor -- we still have many customers using the browser as a corporate standard (and believe it or not, there are some real reasons to delay the upgrade due to the expense of re-writing internal webapps that were specifically targeted at IE6).

On the other hand, I talk to plenty of customers and prospects that are clamoring for us to keep pushing the boundary of what's possible with social software in a web browser, especially after they've seen and tested Google Wave. Dropping IE6 will let us develop richer features faster and with less bugs. We're already committed to supporting it in our next release, but here's my question: should Jive drop official IE6 support in our release after next? No promises on timing of that release of course, but we're likely talking about late next Spring. We'll be conducting a more official survey, but your non-scientific opinion counts too! Leave a blog comment or tweet me @matttucker. And, cheers to a better internet for everyone.

Knowing Which Direction to Take

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:00:41 GMT

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.