After writing about Jive in August 2007, I caught up with Jive again recently for an update and their predictions for 2008. This time I spoke with Sam Lawrence right after reading his tongue in check post, “Admit it, Social Software is goofing off at work”, on their Jive Talks blog. He likes the term “social productivity” to describe how the new tools are changing the way office work is supported. According to Sam, The next level of digital office work is shifting from a disjointed file exchange work model to one that’s much more connected, contextual and collaborative. In the old model, users create documents in isolation and exchange them with other isolated users–all insulated from and out of sync with the bigger picture of relevant interpersonal activity. In the new collaboration model, connected people understand when, what and why to engage and they do it in a unified environment.

Sam first brought me up to speed on what happened to Jive in 2007 before we got into the predictions. They had a great year, which bodes well for the enterprise 2.0 market. Jive launched their enterprise collaboration product, Clearspace, in February. Since then, the firm has achieved 320% growth in sales to the 30 million range and tripled their staff to 120. In August, they got growth funding from Sequoia Capital. They are now seeing more large scale implementations in the 10,000 to 20,000 seat range.

Since Jive has been in the enterprise forum space for a number of years they were able to bring along many of these clients who supported them through the development of Clearspace. Over 70% of new sales have come from word of mouth, another nice sign for the enterprise market. From a technology view, they spent 2007 developing their integrated suite of enterprise 2.0 tools. Now they plan to focus on productivity enhancements and applications.

Jive is also expanding its professional services arm to go along with its social productivity offerings. One CEO told them that wikis were getting out of control but their intranet was a junk pile. He brought in Clearspace but the employees needed guidance on how to use it – which Jive provided. They needed to see the advantages of the social side and not view it as simply a new place to put their files. The breakthrough came as people started putting their meeting notes in Clearspace. Now they could add comments and discussion occurred. The advantages of the social side became apparent and transferred to other activities.

Sam offered his view of the enterprise content market as three big groups. There are the pure play providers who are adding more web 2.0 features and vertical extensions. The big IT vendors are bolting on web 2.0 features and seeing how the market matures. Then the large enterprise content management vendors are changing their messaging and connecting to some of the pure play providers. Not a bad assessment. Sam said Clearspace plans to play in the intersection of these spaces. They developed their application to work behind the firewall in a Java-based open architecture to allow for enterprise application integration with big IT players, including Sharepoint. In 2008, they will continue to add more hooks to both of the big player spaces. They are also adding more features to allow Clearspace to align with work processes and provide social dimension to tasks.

One concept I liked was their desire to create the “visible enterprise.” Sam showed me an example using data from Jive, itself. When you start an activity in Clearspace, you specify if it is to be a document or a discussion. You can still work collaboratively on documents and hold discussions around these documents. This designation just sets out your end goal. You can then see the percentage of documents vs. discussions by department. You can also see who participates in these discussions and where they work in the organization.

In their case, IT, sales engineering (support), and professional services focused more on discussions. Sales and marketing focused more on documents. This gives management clues to work patterns that can be explored further. In sales engineering 42% of their discussions reached out beyond their area and that makes sense as they are in a support function. The development group also carried on 41% of their discussions outside their group, a good sign that they are drawing on the collective wisdom of the firm. Even IT included others outside their group in 38% of their discussion, a sign that they are trying to serve the needs of the broader company.

In addition to supporting greater interactions in a firm, social software creates a lot of data about nature of these interactions. It is nice to see a firm mining this data. It can be a powerful management tool sitting on top of all the productivity tools. I would add to Sam’s predictions. I think that more firms will want to do just what he showed me. The tool providers that facilitate this increased visibility will be the more successful ones in 2008 and going forward.