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New cloud offering from Jive
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 by Angela Ashenden
Online communities software provider, Jive Software, this week announced a new cloud-based version of its Social Business Software (SBS). Delivered via Amazon Web Services, Jive Express provides a lower entry point than the company’s existing hosted and on-premise deployment options, although it (deliberately) stops short of being a full, multi-tenanted software-as-a-service offering. Instead, its single tenanted model leverages virtualisation technology to create a separate instance of the SBS environment in the Amazon cloud for each customer, which can then be easily migrated to one of the other Jive deployment options as required. Setup requires a corporate email domain name (thereby limiting usage to internal collaboration). The service is free for the first 90 days (or the first 100 users), after which a $3 per user, per month fee is chargeable.
In a market where the cloud-based model is seen as a great way of (whether you like it or not) bypassing the procurement procedures of the IT department and getting departmental or project-based collaboration initiatives underway quickly and cheaply, Jive has seemed to lag behind its competitors in this space until now. However, by rejecting the full multi-tenanted approach it hasn’t completely succumbed to peer pressure, instead providing an offering which offers many of the benefits of SaaS (low per-user pricing, easy to get up and running, etc.) while offering a longer term perspective. Unlike many of Jive’s competitors in this market, it isn’t positioning Jive Express as an alternative to its higher-end offerings, nor does it see this as a way of targeting the SMB market (Jive Express is targeted at organisations of 500 employees or more). Instead, this is designed as a more flexible, strategic alternative to its existing trialling options – the sandbox demo on its website, and its 30-day trial download licence. Jive wants to continue focusing on the large enterprise market, but provide a piloting environment that can progress seamlessly to a full-scale enterprise deployment of Jive. With this piloting and business justification in mind, Jive Express includes a “success dashboard”, which helps community managers to develop the community based on user activity (for example potential sub-communities or groups), and provides one-click reporting.
I think this is a sensible move from Jive, allowing it to be compared alongside its competitors in the SaaS space, while retaining its major differentiators in terms of customisability and integration. Jive sees itself as competing with the software industry giants rather than the other pure play vendors, and this announcement helps to cement that ambition.
You can read more about Jive in our On The Radar report.
Posted in Collaboration