Jive Software - Voice is collaboration, not a technology

I think this might be the last in my series of writeups directly from the recent O'Reilly ETel conference. There was so much great information coming from that conference and the incredible braintrust of participants, that while I might be done with basic write-ups, the ripples stirred by some of the participants will be around for a long time. Jive Software is one of those companies stirring up big ripples.

Dave Hersh, Jive Software's CEO gave one of the many great presentations. He also graciously spared some time to chat with me about what they're doing and where they're focused at Jive Software. What struck me, impressed me really, was a simple line from Dave's presentation. It's not just a bullet. This belief came through the entire time I chatted with him.

Voice is collaboration, not a technology

Thinking about ETel now, a week later, Jive Software was one of many companies present who really set the tone and nailed the theme of the whole conference. Jive isn't a voice company. They really are a collaboration company. it's what the do down to their basic DNA. They dig in to learn what works and what doesn't. They focud on open standards, open source and open protocols. Think SIP, Jingle and XMPP. For Jive software, voice is an extension of their collaboration efforts and it just needs to work.

Voice is a component of a larger system. I saw Jive's perspective as a very holistic view.

When we look at unified communications, one view might indicate three domains of focus:

Realtime Communications
Team Collaboration
Messaging

Realtime Communications and Team Collaboration are the two domains Jive plays in. The third domain, messaging, is really all about the infrastructure of collaboration. Email, calendaring and tasks lists and the plumbing in borkering collaboration.

If you look at IM, it isn't hot. It isn't new. if we're brutally honest, it hasn't changed in ten years. IM today hasn't really improved much over what it was ten years ago. (Aside - I'd say it's stagnant and losing momentum. /kac). That's about to change. It is changing quickly in some aspects (Do a Google or Technorati search on Twitter for an example. /kac)

SIP has become the broker for exchange between systems, with RTP handling the media streaming.

IM is out there, for individuals it's been around for a while. For enterprises it's just beginning to take hold. But between IM, voice/VoIP, conferencing, and all our other communications tools, what's really lacking is a workable interruption management solution and mature tools for collaboration in context (whether the context be SFA, CRM, ERP, supply chain management or something else).

Note: For more on interruptions and continous partial attention, and why they are good things, see Stowe Boyd's Overload, Shmoverload post. Don't miss the slides from the great session he led at ETel.

As part of the conference, Jive Software presented their Openfire solution (previously called Wildfire).

Wildfire
The leading XMPP-based unified communication RTC server

Over a million businesses trust Wildfire to power their real-time collaboration. This award-winning, cross-platform application makes it simple and powerful to add enterprise-class chat and VOIP that "just works" to your company.

Jive Software is one of the companies that's really a new find for me as a result of the ETel conference. They aren't a VoIP company, but their collaboration work fits right in the sweet spot of unified communications. It's all about working together, collaborating, managing interruptions.

As fate would have it, Jive Software is in Portland, about an hour or so from me. I'll be watching them closely, because I think they fit the real theme of unified communications -- collaboration. And sometime in the future, I expect to visit them in person. They're another team we'll be doing a field trip visit for podcast and video to get to know them better,