Jive Software Wants to Be Facebook for the Enterprise

Jive Software today launched what it hopes will become a Facebook-style social networking platform for businesses, complete with an activity stream for internal communications, an open API and an open application store. The company also announced that it is licensing the Twitter “firehose” — an index of all 65 million tweets that are posted to the service daily — and will be offering Jive software through the Google Apps marketplace. Jive’s launch is the latest attempt to bring social networking to the enterprise, but this is a market that has so far balked at jumping on board the social bandwagon, and the odds of failure are high.

“Enterprise is the next big opportunity in social networking,” said Christopher Lochhead, the company’s chief strategy officer. “Until now, most of the innovation in that area has been coming on the consumer side. For the most part, the last 10 years or so has been the lost decade for the enterprise, and we want to change that.” According to Lochhead, Jive is “the largest and fastest-growing social business services company” with more than 3,000 customers and a total of over 15 million users of its software platform, which is now called Social Business Software (formerly Clearspace).

Lochhead and Jive Software co-founder Matt Tucker, who is also the company’s chief technology officer, said they want to bring the benefits of social networking — and open standards — to the corporate sector, while still giving companies the control they need to achieve the security and other criteria they require. Launching today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference is a single dashboard-style view of that pulls in whatever relevant information an employee needs to know, Tucker says, whether that comes from Twitter or email or a shared document on the intranet. The company calls this view “Jive What Matters.”