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05.22.07
The Most Important Tech Company You Never Heard Of
 By Jerry Bowles
With so many blog, wiki, and social networking applications-some authorized and some not-finding their way into enterprises these days, CIOs are under increasing pressure to bring these social computing "rat nests" under some kind of formal IT control by integrating them into the enterprise system.
For Jive Software, the most influential software company you may never have heard of, this is the sound of opportunity knocking…again.
Launched in New York in 2001 by a couple of University of Iowa Java wizards named Matt Tucker and Bill Lynch-soon joined by CEO David Hersh-Jive quickly became the group discussion application of choice for large online communities at Sun, Amazon, Apple and many other sites with millions of users.
Tucker and Lynch had realized early on that none of the free PHP forum software had enough cache capacity to handle that kind of traffic so they created their initial application, Jive Forums, as an open source, enterprise solution, using 100% Java, tweaked for maximum caching. That proved to be a key differentiator. Today, Jive Forums powers many of the largest online communities throughout the world, including the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and ships as a standard part of SAP NetWeaver.
In 2004, after their significant others had finished up with grad school in New York, Tucker, Lynch and Hersh packed up the company and moved to Portland, Oregon where labor and overhead was a lot cheaper. The move cost the company a little momentum, but you'd hardly know it-it has been growing like gangbusters ever since. Jive Software ranked 443 on Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest growing private companies last year. Jive now has 50 employees, 1,600 customers, and expects to do about $15 million in revenues this year, according to Hersh. And all this without a penny of outside investment.
And things could get even better as the call for order in the collaboration space increases. Jive's response to the growing enterprise demand to bring all their social software into a unified system is a new collaboration platform called Clearspace, (released in February and already in Version 1.1) that unifies all content tools (whether or not they were made by Jive) using an open, plug-in architecture, that emphasizes real-time communication. For users, Clearspace presents a unified portal-view to content from all over an enterprise. Relationship mapping directs users to content that has changed by topic, not by application. Rather than going through a lot of blogs or wikis to find out if anyone has been discussing something they're interested in, they can look at a category and see if anyone has written a post, IM, or document on the subject. They don't even need to know where to look, since communities are defined by categories, not types of applications.
Beyond providing a unified view of the content being created anywhere in the enterprise, Clearspace also contains its own impressive tool kit that allows collaborative document creation in the form of wiki-style pages; activity management; blogs; document management; threaded discussions; and content syndication. Users can also create dynamically configured workspaces, which can be restricted or open for use with partners and customers.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.
http://www.enterpriseweb2.com
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