Jive Ushers in New Era of Social Business Apps

PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 16, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Jive Software yesterday hosted the first Social Business Developer Summit at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California. During the event, Jive announced the availability of the new Jive Apps SDK beta and unveiled new core features for Jive Apps Market, which will change the way business applications are built, sold and marketed.  

The Social Business Developer Summit is a forum for developers to build new, lightweight, high-impact business applications on the Jive platform that are business-user friendly. Jive and its developer partners are pioneering a new model of business applications based on the 80/20 rule—20 percent of software features deliver 80 percent of the value. Traditional enterprise applications have become too "feature rich," which makes them cumbersome and hard to use. The 80/20 rule focuses on delivering the 20 percent of application functionality that people really need with a focus on the user experience.

More than 30 developers joined the inaugural summit, including Box.net, Gliffy, Lingotek, Manymoon, SlideRocket and UserVoice. Attendees were able to use the new Jive Apps SDK beta in real-time alongside Jive engineers.

New Jive Apps SDK Beta Now Available in Advance of Jive 5

The Jive Apps SDK Beta is now available for free to all developers to start building Jive Apps. Using the Jive Apps SDK beta, developers will be able to test their application in Jive 5. Jive 5 is the new release of Jive Engage Platform, and will be launched early next year. Jive is committed to enabling its developer partners to build their applications and make them available to Jive customers as soon as the Jive platform is launched. The benefits are faster time to market for partners, and faster access to innovation for customers.  

The Jive Apps SDK beta is based on open standards, including oAuth and OpenSocial, helping developers to reduce the development time and effort to build business applications. Jive will contribute key parts of the Jive Apps SDK to the open source community.

"Jive is committed to supporting open source and open standards," said Matt Tucker, Jive co-founder and CTO. "We believe that the future of enterprise is open and social, and have architected our products and platforms around these two key attributes."

Jive recently joined the board of the OpenSocial foundation. Additionally, Mark Weitzel, the President of the OpenSocial Foundation, joined Jive in November as Developer Evangelist for Jive Apps. 

Jive Apps Market Announcements

Jive also unveiled four new core Jive Apps Market features.

Social from the ground up. As part of the development behind Jive 5, Jive has invested heavily in re-imaging the activity stream with Jive What Matters. Developers will now be able to leverage this investment to drive awareness of their own applications within the Jive environment. The most valuable Jive Apps can then go viral within an enterprise, helping accelerate the growth and adoption of the next generation of innovative social business applications.

One-click purchasing. Jive brings the simplicity of the consumer experience to the workplace. Employees are now able to find, try, buy and use business applications that matter to them without waiting days for an administrator to provision them. Jive Apps Market supports both monthly subscriptions for employees and annual subscriptions for the enterprise.

Say good-bye to complex billing. Jive Apps Market will eliminate the need for developers to establish billing relationships with each individual enterprise and employee. Jive will bill and collect the monthly and annual subscription revenues, leaving developers to focus on what they do best: building innovative business applications that delight employees.

Transparent revenue sharing. Developers that build Jive Apps will not incur any upfront costs. The revenue generating from Jive Apps Market is shared, with 75 percent going to the developer and 25 percent to Jive. For the 25 percent revenue share, Jive provides developers with the following services:

• Ensures the quality of Jive Apps by reviewing them before accepting them into Jive Apps Market;
• Markets Jive Apps through Jive Apps Market;
• Sells Jive Apps alongside the Jive platform by the Jive enterprise sales team;
• Manages the billing platform to collect subscription payments; and
• Hosts the infrastructure to bring cloud apps into the enterprise in a secure and scalable way.

"With this announcement we continue to execute against our vision to bring innovation into the enterprise," said Robin Bordoli, VP of Product Management for Jive Apps. "Jive Apps Market will change the economics of how developers market and sell the next generation of social business applications."

'Building the Social Business' Thought Leadership Panel

During the event, Jive hosted a thought leadership panel, Building the Social Business, featuring Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net; Manav Monga, co-founder of Manymoon; Ted Schlein, managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB); and Matt Tucker, co-founder and CTO of Jive. Christopher Lochhead, chief strategy advisor and member of Jive's Board of Directors, moderated the panel.

The topics discussed during the panel included the adoption of social in the enterprise, the importance of the $250 million KPCB sFund in funding the next generation of social business applications, and the unique opportunity to start re-investing in enterprise innovation.  

About Jive Apps and Jive Apps Market

With the launch of the Jive Apps Market in early 2011, businesses will be able to select and adopt the most innovative and easy-to-use applications, and have a direct line of sight into usage, performance and budget control. With Jive Apps both on their personal dashboard and integrated into their daily workflow through Jive What Matters, employees will be liberated from outdated, legacy interfaces.

About Social Business

Social Business is the new way to engage employees, customers and the social web. Jive's Social Business Software (SBS) 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.  The company is backed by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com. 

SOURCE Jive Software