Jive Grabs Twitter Firehose, Launches in Google Apps Marketplace

Jive Software on June 14 struck deals with Google and Twitter to fortify its position versus IBM, Cisco and others in the enterprise collaboration software market.

Jive makes a Social Business Software suite that blends applications for collaboration social networking and social media monitoring and other tools in one increasingly integrated palette.

The company said at the Enterprise 2.0 show it has licensed Twitter's Firehose feed of 65 million daily tweets in an effort to help customers of its Social Business Software suite find and understand what the social media world is saying about their brand.

Users will see tweets scrolling on their screen through the Jive Market Engagement social media monitoring and collaboration tool, giving Twitter a rare inroad into the enterprise at a time when the consumer and enterprise Web are converging.

Jive also launched a lightweight, Web-based version of SBS to the Google Apps Marketplace, the enterprise application Webstore for Google Apps.

The Marketplace lets Google Apps users integrate business apps into the existing collaboration tools within Apps. This will expose Jive SBS to potentially two million Google Apps business users who can try Jive for free and launch it from Google Apps.

Jive, which overhauled its platform last October but is frequently fine-tuning the way it packages, also launched a Jive What Matters dashboard to put relevant information about collaborators on a single page.

Jive What Matters offers a "Now" section, an aggregated view of activity and information from the Web, legacy systems and other social sources; a "My Communications" section for relevant comments and direct messages; and "My Actions," a summary of action items, alerts and project notifications. GigaOm offers a peak of this dashboard here.

The company, who just tabbed Tony Zingale as the new CEO, also launched the Jive Apps Market application gallery to let cloud application providers, third-party developers and system integrators build software on Jive's platform.

This inclides Jive Widget Studio, which lets employees add Open Social widgets such as YouTube videos, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and Flickr streams. The Jive Widget Studio will be available next month to Jive customers with Jive 4.5 and later.

The big news here are Jive's partnerships with Twitter and Google. Letting customers mine the massive tweet base of 190 million users is a big step in bridging the gap between the consumer Web and the enterprise.

Though how important this is is debatable as many of the so-called consumer users on Twitter are also avid enterprise social media advocates.

Jive's inclusion in the Google Apps Marketplace provides a larger outlet into which Jive can offer its tools. While there are only 2 million business users on Google Apps, Google claims there are more than 30 million Google Apps users.

With Jive using Google as a sales platform, business users will have an alternative to Google Apps. This makes the move a gutsy surprise by Google.

All told, these moves should fortify Jive's position versus IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and Google in the market for enterprise collaboration software. Jive is an independent David that may have the clout to compete with the market Goliaths.