The Jive’s CEO, Elisa Steele, Doesn’t See 'Facebook at Work' as a Competitor

“People are Jiving like never before. We have had growth in our mobile applications in a major way. We have actually introduced three new mobile applications and products. We have had ten releases since we have last seen you, so we are innovating faster than ever before.

And we have had 30% increase in our daily users, we have 30 million people around the world using Jive. And what I love about all of this is that people are getting what they need to get their work done and are making the connections that are important to them.

Almost 70% of the audience is a first time attendee at JiveWorld. That’s amazing. It shows our expansion.”

Updates to Jive's Intranet and Customer Community Solutions 

• Jive Daily: Jive adjusted its mobile intranet app Jive Daily to include the ability for users to add and share photos to their community from their mobile devices, mention places and create documents right inside the app. The company will not stop there; enhanced metrics, localization tools, additional security enhancements, and image collections are all on the horizon. 

• Customer Engagement with Sysomos: An upcoming integration with Sysomos will enable companies to have new social listening options for cultivating customer engagement and satisfaction through routing conversations on social media directly in Jive-x community. As a result, organizations will be able to listen to and respond to over a billion conversations online in real time. 

• Jive for Healthcare Collaboration: With the new HIPAA-compliant messaging hub, clinicians will be able to collaborate in real time. A private support center helps healthcare providers access knowledge base documents and participate in discussions with peers.

• Jive Video Professional: This is announced as a multi-point video conferencing and cloud-based collaboration service. Jive Video provides real-time collaboration and eliminates travel expenses and hardware investments as it connects clients and co-workers through direct point-to-point conferencing or multipoint virtual meetings anywhere, at any time, via any device. 

• Corporate communications bundle: This latest addition includes a set of content publishing and metrics tools packaged with Jive's configuration and implementation services. It's designed as an employee engagement starting point. For instance, the bundle for HR has tools for onboarding new employees, email and document storage app integration, and advanced engagement analytics.

Ofer Ben-David, the Executive Vice President of Engineering at Jive Software, commented on the new releases:

"We continue to innovate employee and customer engagement experiences that are at the core of a great business – whether by connecting 30,000 employees across the world, improving collaboration amongst a small team, or creating stronger relationships with millions of prospects, customers and partners."

Also, below, you may find a brief interview with Jive's VP of Support, Kevin Williams, sharing insight on how support organizations can work better together using both internal and external communities.
 

The Position and Performance of Jive in the Marketplace

Gartner notes that the social software market has matured and evolved into four distinct market segments, the Activity Hub, Cloud Office, Business Application, and Situational Applications. Jive is positioned in the Activity Hub market segment as Elisa Steele claims during the Q4 2015 Earnings Conference Call with Seeking Alpha.

According to Gartner’s description of the Activity Hub, vendors in this segment remained focused on the role of a central destination site acting as a horizontal platform which brings work into that common experience. Jive believes the Activity Hub aligns well with its strategy and unique value proposition.

From the geographic perspective, Bryan LeBlanc, Chief Financial Officer at Jive, claims that the U.S. generated $37 million of revenue in the fourth quarter representing 74% of the total revenue and an increase of 3% on a year-over-year basis. Internationally, they’ve generated $13.2 million of revenue representing the remaining 26% of their total revenue and increasing 11% on a year-over-year basis.

Workhub

The company views its Workhub as a key differentiator, which integrates with a number of applications and provides a mesh and context to collaboration happening across the enterprise. Jive also argues that this is something which others can’t compete with. Here are her comments on Facebook at Work from the annual event:

“I think Facebook at Work is creating an environment that was similar to the environment that Jive started ten years ago, or twelve years ago. The ability to do activities, to be social, to post things, to get people’s feedback. I don’t see Facebook at Work solving the interactive intranet. Every company is looking to renovate their intranet, because it’s not working.

I don’t think Facebook is going to provide a solution to healthcare collaboration. That’s a very specific business pain point around the capabilities that we have.”

Another comment on the competition came from David Macmillan, Jive’s General Manager of EMEA & VP:

“You can spin up great simple communities to get a task done in a Slack, but can you really deploy that across the enterprise? And can I manage it?  Is it a true workhorse in terms of collaborative capabilities that also is directly associated with a business output?

Whether it be Salesforce, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, they all have terrific stories to tell and are very talented organizations. There is a difference between someone that wants to believe a story and someone that has a commercial demand. If the two are not aligned, then they will tend to move to the one that is more appropriate for them. If they don’t have a real demand, they might be more predisposed to the story. If they have a real demand they will want to understand if that enterprise platform is robust enough to handle those demands.”

The primary goal with Workhub is providing small group collaboration and being aligned with the larger departments for employees to work in. The ultimate goal is to bring together people, devices, data, systems and apps, into a single cohesive unit.

Virgin Media has recently selected the Jive’s interactive intranet solution to drive engagement amongst its employees and here’s what the Head of Digital Workplace at Virgin Media, Paul Hickman, said:

"Our Jive-powered interactive intranet will help us work well together in a flexible WorkHub that integrates all of our IT tools and applications. Jive will give us a secure employee engagement solution that supercharges productivity and unifies our company across departments and business units."

In the light of all the information above, it is exciting to see how intranet solutions have been consistently progressing by becoming more and more agile and how the traditional approach heads in a more collaborative and engaging direction. Although Jive’s latest releases seem highly promising, the competition is still tough. We will see how Jive shapes the market in the coming months.