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Starting 2010 with a flourish: Jive acquires Filtrbox
Friday, January 8, 2010 by Angela Ashenden
After an extremely positive 2009 in which Jive Software carried out a successful rebranding and repackaging of its core Social Business Platform, as well as securing an additional $12 million in Series B funding, the company is clearly determined to carry this momentum forward into 2010 with yesterday’s announcement of its acquisition of social media monitoring service Filtrbox.
This is an interesting acquisition, and not only for what it says about Jive’s prospects in this highly competitive market, particularly given the current economic conditions. The new solutions-based architecture that Jive launched back in March 2009 layers a number of horizontal/vertical business solutions on top of its core online communities “foundation” – a smart move which helps organisations to quickly see how they might use and gain benefit from this type of technology. The solutions include a mix of internally-facing and internally facing scenarios, but the one which relates most particularly to this acquisition is Market Engagement, which focuses on leveraging public social software mechanisms such as Facebook and Twitter to strengthen the corporate brand. Among the portfolio of solutions, this one has always stuck out, as it is the least collaborative of all the solutions, focusing primarily on the power and value of “social media” to an enterprise. Of course this social media monitoring activity (which will going forward be provided by the Filtrbox software) can then be digested and acted upon by the interested parties within the organisation in the context of an online community.
It is good to see Jive actively strengthening its portfolio in this way, and its interesting that this is an area which the company is confident enough in – and sees enough opportunity in – to invest in it in this way. It also neatly connects the dots between these two distinct but often confused sides to the term “social software” – and so long as Jive is able to clearly articulate this difference to potential customers, this puts the company in a strong position to benefit here. However, this may also mark a changing focus for the company – and even if it is not, it may yet serve to confuse prospects and present an advantage to other players in this space.
Subscribers to our Collaboration Advisory Service can read more about social software in our report Social Software for the enterprise.
See our On The Radar report on Jive.
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