Blog Posts From Jive Talks Tagged With bay_area

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.

Closing the Books on Q2 with a Cloud-Based Solution, a Deeper Ecosystem, and a New Office in Palo Alto

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:00:14 GMT

The past few months have flown by, due in no small part to how heads down we’ve been. In addition to pulling off another record sales quarter, the product team has been busy working on an amazing release and we’ve all been working hard on some huge strategic projects around SBS. So as the summer heat is in full swing and we have a minute to smell the roses, I wanted to share and reflect on some of the great things that have happened over the course of the last three months here at Jive.

SAP partnership - The Jive ecosystem is growing rapidly, through ground-breaking partnerships with companies like SAP. We're integrating their BusinessObjects OnDemand platform with our Social Business Software to create a whole new level of understanding around online community dynamics. I have seen the potential here and it is absolutely inspiring. Expect more in the coming months as we unite world-class software with social technologies.
Jive Express - At Jive, we take cloud computing very seriously, but are doing it in a pragmatic way that allows our customers to adopt whatever model works for their deployment. A big step in this direction was Jive Express, which lets teams or departments get up and running fast, in a cost effective model for smaller deployments within large organizations. They also really like that we've developed this so they can migrate to on-premise if needed, or easily migrate to the full-blown version of our Employee Engagement Center for increased levels of customization and company-wide deployments.
Palo Alto - I just got back from three excellent weeks in the Bay Area where I got to work out of our new office for awhile and assist with some recruiting and customer visits. Outside of the long commute from Mill Valley to Palo Alto, it was great to be with the team down there and get to see so many of our customers. “Jive South” serves as a nice complement to our phenomenal team in Portland as it puts us closer to our rapidly growing customer base in Silicon Valley, as well as provides access to even more top notch talent.
A customer, Premier Farnell - I'd also like to take a moment to highlight Premier Farnell, to showcase some of the great uses-cases of SBS. They are a multi-channel distributor of electronic components, who built a public community for electronic design engineers. With support from their supplier community and industry experts, the Element14 Community brings together all of the information electronic design engineers need to be successful -- from design conception to production. Instead of searching a variety of vendor websites, engineers can solicit design feedback and component suggestions from trusted peers in this community. And, when engineers are ready to make a purchase, they can do this seamlessly via element14 instead of an assortment of vendor sites.

Q3 won’t be restful either to say the least. Lots to do on the product front, lots of new customers going live and we’ll all be getting ready for JiveWorld. Hope to see you there!

Jive's Bay Area Office

matt@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:02:12 GMT

I'm pleased to report that Jive's Bay Area office is officially open! We're still getting unpacked and the office is definitely still un-finished (note the ugly cubes that were already there). But the Palo Alto location already feels like Jive and is going to be a great place to work. Some of the good and/or interesting highlights so far:

Explaining to people that there is in fact commercial space in the Town & Country center (and it's even nice)
Occasionally not being able to tell the difference between Paly High and Stanford students while at Pete's
The same snacks as the Portland office (including Red Bull and beer) -- definitely helps with the late-night coding sessions
The office "running club", which consists of me and Angela until we can hire more people that like running.

Why Palo Alto?

We're expanding our engineering team and looking for great people in the Bay (and Portland!). If you're passionate about social software and building incredible products for the world's biggest companies then we hope you'll reach out. You'll be joining the growing group in Palo Alto and the larger Jive team that's leading the social business software revolution. Please check out the job reqs for application information or drop me an email or DM.