Jive Acquires Proximal Labs

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Jive Software today announced the acquisition of Proximal Labs, a privately held software company that brings innovative 'big data' technology to enterprise social networks.

Proximal will help accelerate Jive's efforts to use the power of 'big data' to unlock the value of the social graph in the enterprise. The acquisition is part of Jive's mission to be at the forefront of Social Business and build one of the next great enterprise software companies.

Jive is pioneering Social Business technology that operates over 'big data' to filter information coming into the enterprise from both internal and external systems through the Jive What Matters intelligence engine. The interface analyzes data and user behavior – including their interests, work and the people with whom they collaborate – called the enterprise social graph. This technology enables companies to be more effective and productive by getting the right data, at the right time, to the right person.

The Proximal technology will significantly accelerate Jive's ability to deliver the value of the enterprise social graph by:

• Providing insight into the interconnected web of employees, customers and partners and how they interact;
• Amplifying the existing Jive intelligence engine that proactively delivers recommendations of content and expertise for increased effectiveness;
• Enhancing search to cover large-scale external and internal data to deliver personalized results;
• Heightening analytics capabilities to provide rich data on the expertise and work of individuals and teams as well as customers and partners;
• Augmenting the capabilities of Jive Social Media Engagement to allow richer relevance and deeper correlations of information from the social web; and
• Measuring productivity and employee satisfaction by assessing key operational criteria such as: the amount of work focused on delivering business objectives; the effectiveness of team collaboration; and employee sentiment related to their work and the company.

"Enterprises are increasingly inundated with vast amounts of information from their existing enterprise systems as well as new social software initiatives, which can sometimes result in too much noise, too much data to track, and a large amount of content to search," said Erin Traudt, Research Director at IDC. "The ability to harness all of this data and turn it into meaningful and actionable intelligence helps provide a valuable competitive advantage for customers. Innovations from the consumer world in working with vast, diverse and real-time data sets have helped turn this into a possibility for enterprises wanting to collect important social data."

"The future of work is personalized," said Brian Roddy, senior vice president of engineering at Jive Software. "Relevant information should find you, proactively, to improve collaboration and enable faster decision making. With the Proximal acquisition, we are accelerating our strategy to unlock the enterprise social graph, using analytics to quantify the way people are collaborating. We offer the technology innovation to move businesses forward at faster speeds."

Proximal is one of the only companies focused on 'big data' solutions for enterprise social networks. At the core of Proximal's capabilities is deep expertise in information retrieval, social analytics, and machine learning with the end goal of making content more relevant and communities more engaging.

The Proximal team will join Jive's engineering group. It includes a talented group of engineers, scientists and innovators, who have been contributors to notable open source projects, including Apache Hadoop. The team brings an unmatched combination of scientific, industry and academic talent. David Gutelius, Proximal Labs co-founder and CEO, will become Jive's Chief Social Scientist.  In his new role, David will drive the enterprise social graph strategy and overall technology innovation at Jive.

"We are very excited to join Jive," said David Gutelius. "Jive is redefining enterprise technology with Social Business software, and we look forward to becoming an integral part of driving the new way to business."

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. For more information, visit http://www.jivesoftware.com/about/companies/proximal-labs.

About Social Business

Social Business is the new way to engage employees, customers and the social web. Jive's Social Business software combines the power of community software, collaboration software, social networking software, and social media monitoring offerings into an integrated platform. Just as social technologies have changed our personal lives, Social Business is changing how enterprises create competitive advantage.

About Jive – The New Way to Business

Jive is the largest and fastest growing independent Social Business Software company in the world. Jive is backed by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com.

About Proximal Labs

Proximal uses cutting edge methods in machine learning and web-scale data mining to power an array of applications that help people get things done faster, find things/people they want, build community and work more effectively with others. The team combines deep domain expertise in big data, machine learning, and social analytics with experience creating products that address some of the most important challenges in large enterprise social networks. For more information, visit http://proximallabs.com.

SOURCE Jive Software