Enterprise social network Tibbr has had a strong emphasis on mobile access for some time but today it has taken another step forward with newly designed apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry 10.

Tibbr is the enterprise social networking solution made by Tibco, the 15-year-old $3.5 billion enterprise software company. It competes against solutions Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software, Salesforce’s Chatter, and Moxie. Tibbr now serves more than 1.5 million paid users across 157 companies.

It makes sense to see Tibco push Tibbr’s mobile capabilities to a new level, especially in light of competitors like Chatter upping its mobile game recently.

Ram Menon, president of Tibco’s social computing division, told VentureBeat the new apps are about making sure workers have access to the service and collaboration tools no matter where they are. Even in the office or at home with computers nearby, many workers want the flexibility to respond and check feeds on their smartphones and tablets.

“Mobile has always been our strong point,” Menon said. “We want to make it easy to see what’s happening in your network. Irrespective of device we’ve got you covered.”

The new apps are all unified with a similar design and feature sets. Each app takes advantage of Tibbr’s “Enterprise Social Graph” to make sure employees see people’s updates and important documents. Through integrated apps, you can even edit and open documents from other services from within Tibbr. For example, if someone in your feed has posted a document from Box, you can tap on it and it will open the file in the Box app. Menon said the apps only do this with apps like Box, Salesforce, Oracle, and SharePoint, but Tibco plans to add more.

Two other handy features in Tibbr’s mobile apps are called “Links” and “Files.” In the top photo, which shows the iPad version of the Tibbr, you can see these sections of the screen near the top. Menon said “Links” and “Files” give a strong visual representation of what the content has been shared on your network.

Take a look at what the iPhone version looks like the photos below.

Photo via Tibbr

Enterprise social networking business Jive Software has launched its spring 2013 update with new features including “rooms” for collaborating on specific projects, and integration with cloud storage service Box.

Jive competes with Microsoft’s Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter to provide enterprise social networking services to companies. On top of that, smaller player Moxie  just took a shot at Jive and its competitors by offering its enterprise social service for free.

With this fierce competition breathing down its neck, Jive has pressure to add new features. Its spring 2013 update fits the bill and offers two major updates:

• Purposeful Places: Jive offers up “deal rooms” for sales teams to work together on deals and “campaign rooms” for teams working on a structured campaign.
• Structured Outcomes: Jive takes conversations and converts them into trackable actions

Jive product marketing VP Nathan Rawlins told VentureBeat that these features are centered around lessening the amount of email workers need to deal with each day.

“In a big company, you’ve got a really big challenge with keeping track of information,” Rawlins said. “Email is a curse. Our focus is to help people communicate more effectively than they do on email.”

Jive has also announced that its services are now integrated with enterprise cloud storage hotshot Box. So Jive customers will be able to collaborate on Box documents from within Jive, and comments are synced across Jive and Box. Customers will also be able to upload content to Box from Jive and access Box docs from Jive mobile apps on iOS and Android.

The new Purposeful Places also have integration with Box and Salesforce data.

Top photo via Jive

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud software giant Salesforce has updated its iOS and Android versions of Chatter — the company’s business social networking and collaboration service — with critical new features to match their browser counterpart, the company said today.

“Companies are social at their core, and Chatter can be the heart of that,” Michael Peachey, Salesforce’s senior director of solutions marketing, told VentureBeat. “Legacy CRM software isn’t social or mobile. This next generation of Chatter sets the bar for mobile and social CRM.”

Chatter competes with Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software, Moxie Software, and Tibbr to help big companies with social networking and collaboration. Salesforce claims Chatter is the backbone for nearly 200,000 active business social networks. Chatter helps Salesforce compete in social, but you can’t really own that arena now unless you have robust mobile apps to support it.

Today’s update sees the Chatter’s mobile apps updated to help with Salesforce’s push to own social and mobile and to be a “customer company.” The Chatter applications have received two major updates, so now you can:

• Post and edit media on the go from the new “publisher” including files, photos, polls, tasks, thanks, and more.
• Access and edit customer information from the Salesforce platform including customer accounts, campaigns, cases, leads, and more

“This makes it so you can see all the context of the account and your key customer data in one place,” Peachey said. “You want to take action in less than 60 seconds, and we’re making that happen.”

Both features seem important to making Chatter more powerful on mobile devices. The “publisher” especially is critical because lets you post polls for your colleagues or photos of whatever you can take with your iPhone or Android device. These sort of things are important for quick collaboration among mobile employees.

While Salesforce does seem to have a strong mobile push as of late, it only seems to care about equipping iPhones, iPads, and Android phones with its tools. Peachy said the company has not yet committed itself to creating Chatter applications for Android tablets, Windows Phone, Windows RT, or Windows 8.

“Our customers aren’t asking us for that today,” Peachey said.

Top photo via Salesforce

Social media management startup Sprinklr has raised $15 million in second-round funding to help it continue to dominate in the social management space and keep an edge over services like Radian6, Wildfire, and Involver.

New York-based Sprinklr first caught our eye in early 2012 right after it raised $5 million in its first round of funding. The company had hardly any press at the time and was incredibly under the radar, but it somehow had attracted huge companies like Samsung, Microsoft, Target, and Nike as customers. The company’s roster of big brands continues to grow and it now claims to have signed 200 “household names.” More than 80 percent of Sprinklr’s clients take in more than $1 billion in revenue each year.

Sprinklr offers these high-profile clients a full suite of social media management tools to help them post across social networks and measure engagement. Because it has attracted big names, it has the pedigree to help it be the Radian6 of big brands.

Sprinklr CEO Ragy Thomas (pictured) told me last year that he was building Sprinklr up to be the “Ferrari” of the social media management industry. He clearly maintains that attitude today.

“The world’s most social brands consistently choose Sprinklr because we enable social engagement, activation, and management across multiple social channels, internal functional groups, and distributed geographies,” Thomas said in a statement.

The new round of funding came from heavy hitting investors Intel Capital and Battery Ventures. Including the new round, Sprinklr has raised $20 million.

Jeremiah Owyang, partner and analyst at Altimeter Group, said that Sprinklr topped the list of of its “most capable” social media management platform in a recent study and thus, he isn’t surprised at Sprinklr’s success thus far.

“After conducting an independent review of 27 vendors, we identified Sprinklr as the ‘most capable’ platform to meet the needs of large enterprises,” Owyang said in a statement. “We’re not surprised by the amount of attention they are getting from the investor community given how well they did in our analysis.”

Sprinklr was founded in 2008 and launched its software in late 2009. The company claims to have had 400 percent year-over-year growth in 2012.

This is a guest post by Matt Tucker, co-founder and CTO of Jive Software.

Last week, Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell wrote a provocative guest post positing that standalone social business software will die this year. I wanted to set the record straight on the parts he got right, but also what he got totally wrong.

The thrust of his argument is that businesses need more than just a Facebook-like activity stream for conversations where employees can talk about work. I totally agree, and also … duh.

But as we enter 2013, the move past this first wave of social business is already well under way. I think Mitchell gets a lot right about what comes next. The second wave of social business is all about delivering measurable business value. It moves beyond conversation and into action. It lets employees get work done instead of just talk about work. And instead of being driven solely by IT, it’s focused on deeper use cases aligned around specific lines of business.

This is a profound transformation. For the first time, companies doing social business the right way are measuring a massive business impact.

McKinsey & Co. last year issued the most comprehensive report on social business and the social economy previously available and found that social technology can provide a 20 to 25 percent improvement in productivity in the enterprise — that adds up to between a $900 billion and $1.3 trillion annual value.

On the heels of that report, we worked with the top global business consulting firm to investigate this further and to understand just how customers are getting value from social platforms, measured by hard ROI metrics.

Even we at Jive were surprised by the results. We found that companies using the Jive platform showed an increase of 15 percent in worker productivity and a 2 to 4 percent increase in topline revenue due to major reductions in time looking for information, fewer meetings, and less email. That’s business value, and those are the type of metrics that every company should demand out of its social business platform.

Standalone social business platforms, when done right, create a powerful social layer that provides the contextual webbing between all enterprise systems, connecting people with expertise and people with information — no matter what app they’re currently using. By giving workers what they need when they need it, they can make decisions faster and be more productive.

Social for social’s sake is dead. Facebook for the enterprise is dead — and frankly, it was never the answer. Pictures of your kids’ soccer team or where the team should go for lunch does not deliver business value. This is what I call the first wave of social business, and it’s long over.

But to equate that with the future of standalone social business software is flat-out wrong.

Those companies that deliver rich, collaborative, and innovative platforms for people to get real work done are winning. These platforms go way beyond the stream so that people can do more of what they love (and get paid to do) –- code, develop, sell, market, innovate, etc.

I believe these platforms won’t come from the IT-centric mega-vendors who are simply bolting on social to their current offerings to sell more business process stuff –- just look at their track records.

So for the record, 2013 is not the year that standalone social business platforms go away, but instead it’s the year that social business goes mainstream. It’s about time.

Matt Tucker is the co-founder and CTO of Jive Software. He is responsible for the long-term technical and strategic direction of Jive’s products. Along with Bill Lynch, Matt founded Jive in 2001 and has helped build the company from just two people to where it is today. You can find Matt on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Social business image via samarttiw/Shutterstock

Tibbr, the enterprise social network from Tibco, has added new features including a social graph, API for developers, and new integrations with Box, Badgeville, Teamly, and more.

Tibbr provides an internal social network for companies and competes with big names like Microsoft’s Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter, and Jive Software. But even with the heavy competition, it has still had fairly decent traction and has attracted such customers as Macy’s, Nielsen, KPMG, Shell, and OOCL. Now the company hopes to attract even more enterprises with the new features inside Tibbr 4.

“I think people are asking for more than what’s already out there,” Tibco president of social computing Ram Menon told VentureBeat. “They want context and intelligence surrounding their notifications.”

New Tibbr 4 features include:

• Insights — As you can see in the top photo, Insights is a handy feature that lets people discover relevant and important things happening in their networks. It highlights how many likes your content has, requests you’ve received and need to respond to, which users have updated their profiles, where users are checking in, and more.

• Social Profile — The new Tibbr social profile allows your info to be connected to the network’s social graph. Ideally, these profiles make HR’s life easier with better data about employees, and the feature includes ways to interact with public social networks too. It also lets employees find other people inside their companies who have expertise they need.

• Enterprise Social Graph API — This API tool lets developers tap into all the data being posted by employees. If used right, app devs could use this data when they build new applications for the workplace that mesh with Tibbr’s interface.

• Partner ecosystem and app store — Finally, Tibbr 4 includes what amounts to an app marketplace. Companies will be able to choose and distribute apps to their employees using Tibbr, and outside companies like Box, Badgeville, Teamly, and Fileboard will be able to write to the Tibbr API. For example, Box is integrated so you can access Box functions from Tibbr without opening a new tab in your browser.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tibco provides on-premise and cloud infrastructure software to more than 4,000 customers. Tibbr has 1 million paid users across more than 100 companies.

Check out a few more screens of Tibbr’s new design below.

Google has added new business-focused features to its Google+ social network including restricted posts, video Hangout integration with Google Calendar, and better administrative controls.

Google+ has mostly had a consumer-facing focus since its launch more than a year ago. But now it’s beginning to show that it’s committed to businesses using the service now as part of the Google Apps suite. Google seems to think if a business is already using Google Docs and Gmail, then that business might as well start using Google+ for video chat and social networking.

“Today we’re launching an initial set of Google+ features designed specifically for businesses, and we’re excited to move into a full preview mode for Apps customers,” a Google spokesperson said. “During this preview period, organizations that have gone Google will be able to use the business features of Google+ for free through the end of 2013 while we continue to add more features and administrative controls designed for organizations.”

The first major feature is restricted posts, which are private to your organization and can’t be shared outside of your business network. You also add sharing your post with people outside the organization as well.

Next is Google+ Hangouts integration with Google Calendar. Hangouts was already integrated with Gmail and Docs, so it was easier to launch Hangouts from those apps. Now Google Apps users will be able to add Hangouts to events in their calendars, making it possible for attendees to join a Hangout from the invite or Cal entry.

Finally, Google is adding better administrative controls to Google+. Admins will be able set defaults and restrictions on what employees can do with Google+ posts. They can also set up restrictions on Google+ Hangouts to make video meetings private.

Google also has more business-focused features planned for the future, including “a mobile version of Google+ for enterprise users and more administrative controls.”

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Original briefcase photo: Kitch Bain/Shutterstock

Corporate social media strategists at global brands are confronting a new set of tough challenges. Enterprise executives are beginning to take notice of the socially empowered customer and looking to meet those demands.

Now, leading social strategists are starting to field requests from press relations, human resources, special events, and crisis management teams about being “more social.” Combine internal demands with an explosion of new social channels to contend with and a burgeoning volume of messages, and it’s no wonder that Calm.com exists.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s increasing pressure from all sides inside the organization. According to the analysts at Altimeter Group, large enterprises average 178 social media outposts and proliferation is continuing. Sprinklr’s work on behalf of new clients actually shows the number to be significantly higher. For one Fortune 50 client, we found close to 1,400 accounts globally.

Pressure from all sides internally and an accelerating number of channels and messages puts the corporate social strategist in a challenging position and most aren’t ready for it. Most social strategists don’t know what to do when the time comes to write a request for proposal (RFP) for an enterprise-wide social platform. Sprinklr had one executive (who heads social for a major hospitality chain) admit, “I didn’t know what to write in an enterprise social RFP, so I just Googled it.” A large part of the problem stems from a deficit of common terminology and frameworks for thinking about social at enterprise scale.

We’ve been thinking about these requirements for a long time. Based on our work with more than a hundred global brands, we’ve identified six elements that every Social RFP should have. Obviously, we’re not a disinterested party (here’s our free PDF on it), but you can judge for yourself.

The six must-haves for every enterprise social request for proposal are as follows:

1. Multi-Channel management

Brands know that it is critical to deliver a consistent experience to a customer, prospect, or influencer regardless of the channel through which they choose to engage. If a brand cannot recognize that @jr123 is the same person as john.russell on YouTube, it will have a difficult time providing an experience that drives satisfaction and word of mouth. As more channels come online, global brands will want and need to integrate those into a single platform and create and maintain a Universal Profile of the Social Customer.

2. Cross-functional capabilities

The Social Customer doesn’t care if she is interacting with a Twitter account managed by a Facebook page managed by customer service. She expects that an inquiry will be received and she will get a response. Easy enough for her, but behind the firewall, this creates a set of requirements such as escalation, issue tracking, audit trails, templates, digital asset management, and more to make sure that messages can be routed from one team to another and the customer experience is unified and consistent.

3. Scalability

There are two sides to the scalability coin. On the one side, enterprises will need a solution that can be implemented in multiple countries and geographies, support for multiple languages, training, and global implementation capabilities. The other side is message volume. The social customer is still just “warming up” and we all know that message volume will continue to expand. No human (or group of humans) will be able to manage the quantity. Enterprises will need smart technology to identify, score, rank, and route messages to the right departments, divisions, and teams.

4. Social governance

Lawyers lie awake at night worrying that social media policies are being followed and access is not given to corporate social outposts without approval. Business executives fret over inconsistent brand voice and improper asset (images, logos, URLs, etc.) utilization, particularly at the local level. For both, a strong infrastructure that supports centralized control over passwords, access, permissions, and assets is a must.

5. Customized reporting

With so many stakeholders and channels, it will be impossible for anyone drafting an enterprise social RFP to predict the reporting needs of those using the platform. The critical component here is flexibility. Social strategists will have the need to offer their constituents a set of pre-configured reports, for sure, but on top of that, the capability to take various social metrics and create dashboards and reports that meet each group’s unique needs as they seek to connect social with traditional KPIs.

6. Rapid product enhancements

The social space evolves quickly, and the needs of enterprises are dynamic. Too often, enterprise software vendors are rigid in release schedules and feature road maps. While planning is important, so is flexibility, particularly in a market which is not fully mature yet. There has to be a process and methodology for developing and implementing client-specific requests.

It’s an exciting time for the social customer, and it’s an exciting and challenging time for global enterprises as they seek to adapt to new realities. As Chris Baccus, executive director of digital and social at AT&T said, it’s time to “get over the fear” and lay the foundation now for enterprise-wide social at scale.

That foundation is built upon asking the right questions at the beginning.

Jeremy Epstein is the Vice President of Marketing for Sprinklr. Prior to joining Sprinklr in Feb. 2012, Jeremy was the Founder/CEO of Never Stop Marketing, an international consulting firm which served F50 clients such as Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft. Before that, he served as the lead instructor for Microsoft’s global Digital and Social Marketing training programs.

Top photo credit: tovovan/Shutterstock

Enterprise social networking company Jive Software has considerably upgraded its product offerings for the first time since the company went public last December, with the debut of new apps to help its customers stay in touch and collaborate better.

Palo Alto-based Jive faces strong competition from Yammer, Moxie, and Salesforce’s Chatter, but it’s also in a class of its own as a newly public company. Jive earned $22.5 million in revenue back in February per its fourth fiscal quarter. To keep increasing revenue, it needs to attract more customers and up the ante on its offerings. Which brings us to today’s announcement.

The new apps and features Jive has built for its customers greatly expand its capabilities in social, search, and collaboration. One of the most interesting new additions is Jive Anywhere, which lets you comment on and share any content from around the web with your co-workers. For example, you can go to a Wikipedia article, make a note about it, and then share that article (with comments included) with your team.

“We’ve talked about this for years, but now we’re finally doing it,” Nathan Rawlins, Jive’s VP of product marketing, told VentureBeat. “We thought that social should follow you and it should be a pervasive experience no matter where you go.”

Here’s how the company describes the new features:

• Jive Anywhere – a breakthrough capability that extends social business to the web at large, enabling users to access
social functions from any website or web application.
• Jive !App Experiences – enabling users to invoke powerful applications and merge them seamlessly into social
business workflow with a single keystroke.
• Jive Edge – a sophisticated social intelligence engine that optimizes a wide range of social business processes such
as search, providing more relevant, precise, and personalized results.
• Major improvements in Jive What Matters activity streams, including customizable Attention Streams focused on
specific processes and people.
• Jive for Teams – a new group collaboration solution for teams of 25 to 250,000 people.
• A dramatically simplified and engaging user experience.

Companies that want to give Jive a spin can also now do so with Try Jive, a 30-day free trial meant for small and large teams that is entirely browser-based.

You can view more photos showing Jive’s new feature lineup below:

Rypple dubs itself as a “cloud-based social performance management company.” Basically, it provides software designed to help managers improve employee performance through “social goals” and consistent feedback and recognition. It competes in an increasingly competitive (and essential) market for cloud-based human resource management services. Leading competitors include SuccessFactors, which enterprise giant SAP recently announced it was acquiring for $3.4 billion, Taleo (whose revenues come mostly from recruiting), Workday, Ultimate Software, and Cornerstone OnDemand.

Rypple counts outfits like Facebook, Mozilla, Spotify and Rackspace as customers, and it has raised $13 million to date in three rounds of funding.

The deal is expected to close by the end of April 2012. Pending approval, Salesforce will take over Rypple and re-name the service as “Successforce” to meld it better with the cloud company’s branding. Successforce will fall under Salesforce’s new human capital management (HCM) unit, which will be run by John Wookey, Salesforce’s executive VP for advanced applications.

“Salesforce.com and Rypple share a vision for extending the social enterprise to transform the way we work,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, in a statement. “The next generation of HCM is not just about a cloud delivery model, it’s about a fundamentally better way to recruit, manage and empower employees in a social world.”

Salesforce’s commitment to HCM signifies the social direction major companies are headed and with Rypple, we’re seeing another example of consumer-focused tech applied to business. Further validating these notions, enterprise social networking company Jive Software went public this week.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce’s social productivity service Do.com has moved out of beta and into general availability for anyone who wants to give it a spin.

When Do.com debuted in early November in limited beta, the company gave VentureBeat 200 invites, and I know several readers were dismayed that they couldn’t procure one. Now, those looking to add a social element to task management can sign up here.

The service is based on popular social productivity app Manymoon, an app Salesforce acquired back in February. It has a simple interface and intelligent HTML5 deployment, but it’s also built with Salesforce’s emphasis on accessibility and security. It was built on top of Heroku’s cloud app platform, offers an open API for developers and has received input from some of Salesforce’s brightest team members. Plus, it offers e-mail task management and interacts with Google Apps, Salesforce and Dropbox to make tasks jibe with tools your team already knows.

At present, the app is completely free, but it will add paid features next year. Salesforce Senior VP Sean Whiteley told me in November that premium features might include adding new fields and deeper administration tools.

Do.com has also posted a quirky video heavily inspired by Alexander Payne’s Election that explains more about what it can do:

Enterprise social networking company Jive Software priced shares of its initial public offering at $12 a share and sold them to raise $161.3 million on Monday. Trading begins tomorrow for the company’s stock on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol JIVE.

Palo Alto-based Jive filed to go public back in late August, with a stated intention of raising up to $100 million. But the offering will be higher than its original plan with an offering of $160.8 million, with a market cap of around $700 million. The company sold 13.4 million shares, which is up for the plan to sell 11.7 million shares.

The company competes with other enterprise social networking products like Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter. Jive gives enterprises social networks that work function similarly to Facebook and Twitter. Employees create a profile with their information and then have the ability to post content, comment on others’ statuses and share files seamlessly. Other third-party apps also work with the service, including Box and SlideRocket.

Jive reported revenue of $20.8 million in the third quarter of 2011, which is up 69 percent from $12.3 million in the same quarter a year ago. Unfortunately, it also reported a net loss of $7.6 million in Q3 2011, which doesn’t look great when going into an IPO.

Before it filed to go public, Jive raised $57.5 million total. The company’s most recent round of funding came July 2010, when it raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. Sequoia owns 36.2 percent while Kleiner Perkins owns 14.2 percent.

Jive’s IPO will be joined later in the week by Zynga’s much bigger one. Zynga plans to raise up to $1.15 billion with its IPO on Friday.

A video outlining Jive Software’s apps can be viewed below:

Since its launch in 2008, Yammer has made incredible gains with enterprise users, with more than 3 million verified corporate users and more than 80 percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list using the network. It has attracted more than 100,000 businesses in 160 countries. The service tailors Facebook and Twitter-like communication strategies to give businesses activity feeds, private messaging, polls, Q&A and more.

The new round was led by The Social+Capital Partnership, a new VC fund established by former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya. The Social+Capital Partnership contributed $15 million, but current investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners also participated. Yammer last had a $25 million round last November, and its total funding now sits at $57 million.

Yammer CEO David Sacks told Dow Jones he didn’t immediately need more funding because of the major round last year, but he couldn’t resist getting Palihapitiya involved. Palihapitiya has lots of lessons learned from Facebook that he may be able to transfer over to Yammer to make it an even better social networking tool.

In the past few months, Yammer has made some big additions to its service that have attracted headlines and made the site even more competitive with Salesforce.com’s free Chatter service and Jive Software. The company unveiled embeddable activity feeds, a more powerful desktop application and an API that enables single-sign-on to third-party websites.

Are you a fan of Yammer and its service?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

IBM on Monday launched three updated mobile applications designed to help businesses that use its enterprise social networking package, Connections.

The apps, for iOS, Android and BlackBerry, plug in enterprise users and their customers so they can access things like blogs, employee data, status updates, wikis, videos and photos. Ideally, enterprises that use Connections will have an edge when it comes to collaboration and unified communication solutions.

The IBM Connections software was previously known as Lotus Connections and has been around in some form since 2007. Actively moving the service into the mobile sphere makes sense as more executives, managers and general employees need to make decisions, crowdsource ideas and get answers on the go.

There’s also added functionality on each smartphone platform, with additional apps that support Connections. On the iOS version of IBM Lotus Notes, there’s a “partial wipe” ability that lets IT administrators wipe just confidential company data from an iPhone or iPad while keeping a worker’s photos, videos and contacts. For BlackBerry, users can actively participate in online meetings using the IBM Sametime app if they choose.

On the Android version of Lotus Notes Traveler, there’s a click-to-call ability tied into the operating system’s calendar. Android also has IBM’s Sametime app, which creates a unified communications feature so users can take advantage of text-to-speech and instant messaging functions. And cloud-based meeting support is planned to be available later this year on Android with the LotusLive Meetings app.

The three Connections apps can be immediately downloaded from their respective app stores, while Lotus Notes Traveler is on all platforms and IBM Sametime is available now for BlackBerry devices.

Are you a user of IBM Connections? What do you think of its service?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Business social networking company Jive Software has filed to go public and raise up to $100 million, according to a filing today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Jive Software supplies enterprises with internal social networks similar to Facebook. An employee can create a profile and interact with co-workers much in the same way they do on Facebook — by posting content, commenting on it, sharing files and interacting with some other third-party enterprise software providers. Jive Software, along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net, is taking many of the lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook and applying them to the enterprise.

“I think it’s good for the space, where Jive and Yammer agree is the potential for social networking to transform the enterprise,” enterprise social network Yammer chief executive David Sacks told VentureBeat. “Both of us are pursuing that, I think it’s good that we have a company in the space who’s filed.”

The company lost $16 million in the second quarter this year, up from a loss of around $7 million in the second quarter of 2010. But the company’s revenue has increased sequentially each quarter for the past six quarters. Jive brought in $18 million in revenue in the second quarter this year, up from $10.5 million in revenue in the second quarter last year. The company brought in $46 million in revenue last year.

Around 41 percent of Jive’s revenue is derived from our private cloud instances, compared to 59 percent of revenue derived from the company’s public cloud customers for the first six months of the year, a Jive spokesperson told VentureBeat.

Jive is more than 10 years old and has said it has 13.6 million users and 635 customers, including the likes of Hewlett-Packard and T-Mobile. An earlier report indicated the company had 3,000 customers. The company specializes in social networking software that exists on in-house servers, compared to cloud-based remote servers used by Yammer.

“Jive is a 10-plus-year-old company, it has a fairly traditional distribution model behind the firewall,” Sacks said. “They need this IPO to happen because they’re losing so much money.”

Yammer has three million verified corporate users, and 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. It uses a freemium model that gives away some services for free and then charges for premium services. Box.net, another enterprise company that uses the freemium model, currently has six million users and around 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

“I’m incredibly excited about it, I think it’s gonna be great for the category, great for showing there’s maturity in these next-generation software companies in the enterprise,” Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie told VentureBeat. “You tend to go public only at a certain scale, it’s a fairly strategic business tactic.”

Jive raised $57.5 million total before it filed to go public. The company’s most recent round of funding closed in July, 2010, when the company raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. Sequoia Capital owns 36.2 percent of Jive Software while Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers owns 14.2 percent of the company.

Salesforce announced today that it is releasing a free, stripped down version of its twitter-like micro-blogging application Chatter to compete with other free-to-use collaboration services like Huddle and Yammer at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this December.

Chatter’s pitched as a collaboration tool for businesses with multiple employees strewn across the country. It’s also good for large businesses where communication can be difficult because there are a lot of distractions and minor details to hash out. Chatter users can let everyone know what they are working on and track specific projects and users — much like Twitter users do.

Chatter is already available as a part of Salesforce’s services, a massive customer resource management suite that many businesses use to manage their finances and other aspects of their business. Chatter’s available to everyone else for $15 a month per user. But that made it hard to justify introducing the business collaboration service into a work environment that hasn’t had any time to try it out, said Kevin Spain, a partner with Emergence Capital Partners and a Salesforce investor.

Meanwhile, other free-to-use enterprise collaboration services have seen some serious growth. Yammer recently revamped its business micro-blogging software to behave more like a Facebook for enterprise users and has seen a lot of success as a result. It’s free to join Yammer, and the company makes money off subscription models for premium services and IT servicing.

That’s what made other freemium services like Yammer so popular — because Yammer users can try it out before they invest in the software’s premium services. In fact, Spain even called on Salesforce to set its micro-blogging service free to let business try it out in order to compete with other collaboration tools like Yammer.

Luckily, Salesforce listened to its users and investors. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said 60,000 of Salesforce’s 87,200 customers are currently using Chatter, according to a report from ReadWriteWeb. But that’s largely because the service was marketed as an add-on to its traditional CRM suite. With this freemium version, it’s clear Salesforce has much loftier goals for its micro-blogging application as it is now looking to take on other collaboration services.

Score another one for the freemium revenue model as well. What began with an interesting experiment in video games has exploded into a powerful revenue model that shows up everywhere from social networks to enterprise collaboration tools. A third of the top-grossing apps on the Apple App Store — which include any number of apps — are free to download and make money off the sale of virtual goods and premium services.