Jive World 2011 Recap
Quick Read
Full Report
Last week at the stunning Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Jive Software held their 3rd annual conference. According to Jive's executives there were over 1200 people in attendance, a 70% increase over the previous year, and the number of sessions increased by over 80% providing the attendees even more content to consume. New this year was also the addition of a full day bootcamp where people just getting started with Jive could learn all about the product. I attended this training and the room was packed to capacity. As a veteran of vendor marketing claims (having created several myself), I know better than to focus on the specific numbers, and instead take away the fact that the event was clearly much larger than the previous event, showing tremendous momentum in interest from new prospects and engagement from existing customers and business partners.
If I had to sum the event up in one world, it would be lively. Each morning began with the typical keynote format. Sprinkled between the executive speeches, Jive entertained the audience with performances that echoed the key theme of "People are the platform". There was a graceful and athletic opening by break-dancer Little Buck, an innovative musical performance by 15 year old flutist Annie Wu who laid down her own background track by beat boxing while she played, and Tony Award winning playwright and actor Sarah Jones who performed characters ranging from a Jewish grandmother to a RAP artist. I wonder how many user licenses Jive would charge her for?
As a first time attendee one of the things that really stuck out for me was how focused Jive is on their community. They enabled attendees to meet each other by providing everyone 50 personal trading cards from Meet-Meme. In addition to the standard customer-story presentations, they took a cue from TV award shows and paired customers to come up on stage and announce the next speaker. That little trick provided a great way to highlight several customer names without taking up a lot of time, and also made those customers feel like an important part of the event. They mentioned the importance of business partners in every talk, and demoed several of their applications on stage, sending a clear message about their dedication to the Jive App Store ecosystem.
Wednesday morning's keynotes did not focus on products or company news, but instead set out to establish Jive's overall theme that it's not about the technology, but rather the people that are the platform. Both Tony Zingale (CEO) and John Rizzo (CMO) gave excellent talks, without the use of a teleprompter I should add. While that may not seem significant, in my opinion it made the speeches sound quite genuine and not as rehearsed. Tony announced a modification to Jive's previous slogan of "The New Way To Work", updating it to "The Only Way To Work". He also introduce "Me to the power of We", at which point I had enough of heard marketing slogans! My cynicism aside, the core of his talk was about the billions of dollars enterprises have spent over the last few decades creating silos of ERP, HCM, CRM, ECM (and other alphabet soup) systems, and how now is the time to transform those systems into ones where people are now the most important asset. He highlighted CSC's use of Jive with their 90,000 employees and McGraw-Hill who is just starting the digital transformation of their intranet. Maria Pinchevsky, SVP of Customer Service and Sales at T-Mobile talked about how they are using Jive to train the thousands of support staff in their call centers and retail locations, reducing education costs and improving customer response times. Finally author Gabe Zichermann gave a good introduction to gamification, the industry buzzword that everyone is talking about with respect to providing incentive and motivation to employees. I have a lot of thoughts on gamification that I'm going to save for a future blog post.
The big product news came on Thursday, when the keynotes focused on 3 key themes that are driving Jive's roadmap:
Nathan Rawlins (Sr. Director of Product Marketing), Brian Roddy (SVP Engineering) and Oudi Antebi (SVP of Enterprise Solutions) explained a few of the ways Jive hopes to get "more people, more engaged":
The real fun (for me, a product geek) began when Brian provided a look into some of the future features:
For the second key theme, "Turn Social Capital into business value", David Gutelius (Chief Social Scientist) discussed how the combination of data + context = intelligence. For example, different people searching for the same term should not get back the same results. Instead, the person's role, expertise and social graph should all factor into the information that is returned to them. David concluded by explaining that the future is not just about improving search, but instead improving ways that the system will know who/what to show you, even without you having to look for it.
Next up Chris Morace (SVP Business Development), showcased the power (and significance) of the Jive Apps platform and ecosystem. This is such an important topic that I'm going to be writing another blog post specifically about Jive Apps, but in short Jive's partner ecosystem is flourishing, which is fantastic news for Jive customers. A few apps that were highlighted include Rypple, BunchBall and CrowdFactory, but there are dozens of applications in the App Store and many of the vendors were in attendance at the show. Chris also announced that the Jive Social Media Engagement application (which comes from Jive's acquisition of FiltrBox) is now free for Jive 5 customers.
Finally, in Thursday's closing session, John Rizzo took the stage once again, this time to introduce something they are internally calling *Project Thunder*. Thunder, which will be available to select customers in a private beta, represents a future version of Jive which will focus on 3 core concepts:
While it's easy to get caught up in the excitement and glitz of a conference and future features, it's important to remember that back at the office not everything smells like roses. Many customers I spoke to during the event expressed varying levels of frustration over reliability, support, upgrades, costs, and complexity in pricing models. I often heard people joking about "What version are you running?" as they traded business cards and a common theme in the lobby bar was exchanging war stories and fears about moving to a new release. Of course this is not unique to Jive, support is one of the most difficult things for all software vendors. The Jive executive team told me they are investing heavily in Support and in new offerings like Jive Cloud, in an effort to reduce some of these issues.
Jive World was a huge success in providing an opportunity for Jive customers to meet and share experiences with each other. Business Partners were able to showcase the applications they are building as they extend the Jive ecosystem. Prospects were able to speak to customers in similar situations to help them in their vendor selection process. While I did not get a chance to attend many breakouts or roundtables, from what I could read in the tweet-steam (#jw11) and hear in conversations it sounds like they were all quite good. I believe they are making the presentations and recordings available to all attendees, and perhaps to the general public but I'm not sure. The Jive team did a fantastic job running the event, I'm hard pressed to think of anything I would suggest they change, my congratulations to everyone involved.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on Jive, Jive World, or the collaboration industry itself.
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- The Jive Apps ecosystem is win-win-win for Jive, their customers and business partners
- Jive will be offering a new Jive Cloud deployment model
- Lots of free things for Jive 5 customers, including Analytics Dashboard, the Jive Social Media Engagement application and 100 licenses of Jive for Outlook
- Lots of cool stuff on the future roadmap
Full Report
Last week at the stunning Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Jive Software held their 3rd annual conference. According to Jive's executives there were over 1200 people in attendance, a 70% increase over the previous year, and the number of sessions increased by over 80% providing the attendees even more content to consume. New this year was also the addition of a full day bootcamp where people just getting started with Jive could learn all about the product. I attended this training and the room was packed to capacity. As a veteran of vendor marketing claims (having created several myself), I know better than to focus on the specific numbers, and instead take away the fact that the event was clearly much larger than the previous event, showing tremendous momentum in interest from new prospects and engagement from existing customers and business partners.
If I had to sum the event up in one world, it would be lively. Each morning began with the typical keynote format. Sprinkled between the executive speeches, Jive entertained the audience with performances that echoed the key theme of "People are the platform". There was a graceful and athletic opening by break-dancer Little Buck, an innovative musical performance by 15 year old flutist Annie Wu who laid down her own background track by beat boxing while she played, and Tony Award winning playwright and actor Sarah Jones who performed characters ranging from a Jewish grandmother to a RAP artist. I wonder how many user licenses Jive would charge her for?
As a first time attendee one of the things that really stuck out for me was how focused Jive is on their community. They enabled attendees to meet each other by providing everyone 50 personal trading cards from Meet-Meme. In addition to the standard customer-story presentations, they took a cue from TV award shows and paired customers to come up on stage and announce the next speaker. That little trick provided a great way to highlight several customer names without taking up a lot of time, and also made those customers feel like an important part of the event. They mentioned the importance of business partners in every talk, and demoed several of their applications on stage, sending a clear message about their dedication to the Jive App Store ecosystem.
Wednesday morning's keynotes did not focus on products or company news, but instead set out to establish Jive's overall theme that it's not about the technology, but rather the people that are the platform. Both Tony Zingale (CEO) and John Rizzo (CMO) gave excellent talks, without the use of a teleprompter I should add. While that may not seem significant, in my opinion it made the speeches sound quite genuine and not as rehearsed. Tony announced a modification to Jive's previous slogan of "The New Way To Work", updating it to "The Only Way To Work". He also introduce "Me to the power of We", at which point I had enough of heard marketing slogans! My cynicism aside, the core of his talk was about the billions of dollars enterprises have spent over the last few decades creating silos of ERP, HCM, CRM, ECM (and other alphabet soup) systems, and how now is the time to transform those systems into ones where people are now the most important asset. He highlighted CSC's use of Jive with their 90,000 employees and McGraw-Hill who is just starting the digital transformation of their intranet. Maria Pinchevsky, SVP of Customer Service and Sales at T-Mobile talked about how they are using Jive to train the thousands of support staff in their call centers and retail locations, reducing education costs and improving customer response times. Finally author Gabe Zichermann gave a good introduction to gamification, the industry buzzword that everyone is talking about with respect to providing incentive and motivation to employees. I have a lot of thoughts on gamification that I'm going to save for a future blog post.
The big product news came on Thursday, when the keynotes focused on 3 key themes that are driving Jive's roadmap:
- Get More people, more engaged
- Turn Social Capital into business value
- Extend Jive to/with other systems and platforms
Nathan Rawlins (Sr. Director of Product Marketing), Brian Roddy (SVP Engineering) and Oudi Antebi (SVP of Enterprise Solutions) explained a few of the ways Jive hopes to get "more people, more engaged":
- As a result of Jive's Acquisition of OffiSync, they now provide seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook and Office. Jive for Outlook brings social features to the tools that many people already use for work. Jive for Outlook is NOT included in the base per user price of Jive, but they are offering 100 free licenses to Jive World attendees to help get organizations hooked.
- Jive has deployed a new Facebook fan page that integrates with Jive's own external community. This is an example of how external communities can authenticate with Jive using OAuth, providing a seamless experience.
- Jive profiles will be able to pull in information from LinkedIn
- A new mobile app based on HTML5 for universal access, which provides enterprise security features like remote wipe. There will be a mobile home page where admins can push information to people via a banner at the top of the screen. The new mobile app will support custom branding.
The real fun (for me, a product geek) began when Brian provided a look into some of the future features:
- Custom Streams: People will be able to create custom streams based on content, roles, tags and more, then share those streams with colleagues. For example, you could configure a stream that contains the people, pages and twitter feeds for a product launch, then share that stream with all the people involved. In addition to their standard streams, they will now have this custom stream that keeps them informed and engaged.
- Guided Tour: A new tips and tricks UI that provides contextual feedback to help people learn about features. These pop-up boxes can contain text or animations and can even provide a guided tour that moves around from one area of the product to another.
- Theme Builder: A point and click UI that allows admins to create the branding for their site. It's simple and upgrade safe. I believe this is not being created by Jive, but is an application created by SolutionSet. (updated based on feedback in the comments section)
- Free Analytics Dashboard: Jive's acquisition of Proximal Labs provided them with an advanced analytics platform for monitoring the usage and interaction of people and pages inside Jive. Until now, access to those features was an expensive add-on to the standard Jive pricing. Starting with Jive 5 customers will have access to a free basic analytics dashboard that will provide information around user growth, active participation, contributions, etc.
- Jive Cloud: A new deployment option that does not provide as much customization as on-premises, but will automatically provide quarterly updates. Yearly those 4 releases will be combined and turned into next major release which will then be made available to on-premises customers.
- "I'm new here": Improvements to the recommendation engine, including the ability for Admins to define an initial set of people and content so that new users have a compelling experience right when they start using Jive.
- Tablet App: They previewed an early build of a dedicated Jive tablet app, which is very different than the HTML phone app in terms of both UI and features.
- Multi-communities: These will allow you to invite external people into your internal instances. They see a slimmed down UI that only shows the parts of the community that they have access to.
For the second key theme, "Turn Social Capital into business value", David Gutelius (Chief Social Scientist) discussed how the combination of data + context = intelligence. For example, different people searching for the same term should not get back the same results. Instead, the person's role, expertise and social graph should all factor into the information that is returned to them. David concluded by explaining that the future is not just about improving search, but instead improving ways that the system will know who/what to show you, even without you having to look for it.
Next up Chris Morace (SVP Business Development), showcased the power (and significance) of the Jive Apps platform and ecosystem. This is such an important topic that I'm going to be writing another blog post specifically about Jive Apps, but in short Jive's partner ecosystem is flourishing, which is fantastic news for Jive customers. A few apps that were highlighted include Rypple, BunchBall and CrowdFactory, but there are dozens of applications in the App Store and many of the vendors were in attendance at the show. Chris also announced that the Jive Social Media Engagement application (which comes from Jive's acquisition of FiltrBox) is now free for Jive 5 customers.
Finally, in Thursday's closing session, John Rizzo took the stage once again, this time to introduce something they are internally calling *Project Thunder*. Thunder, which will be available to select customers in a private beta, represents a future version of Jive which will focus on 3 core concepts:
- Instant engagement: Get people up and running faster. Draw people in. Measure how you're doing and help you improve adoption.
- Constant innovation: Via Jive cloud, customers will be able to get features sooner and more reliably.
- Future proof scale: Jive needs to be able to scale to millions of users to support external communities.
While it's easy to get caught up in the excitement and glitz of a conference and future features, it's important to remember that back at the office not everything smells like roses. Many customers I spoke to during the event expressed varying levels of frustration over reliability, support, upgrades, costs, and complexity in pricing models. I often heard people joking about "What version are you running?" as they traded business cards and a common theme in the lobby bar was exchanging war stories and fears about moving to a new release. Of course this is not unique to Jive, support is one of the most difficult things for all software vendors. The Jive executive team told me they are investing heavily in Support and in new offerings like Jive Cloud, in an effort to reduce some of these issues.
Jive World was a huge success in providing an opportunity for Jive customers to meet and share experiences with each other. Business Partners were able to showcase the applications they are building as they extend the Jive ecosystem. Prospects were able to speak to customers in similar situations to help them in their vendor selection process. While I did not get a chance to attend many breakouts or roundtables, from what I could read in the tweet-steam (#jw11) and hear in conversations it sounds like they were all quite good. I believe they are making the presentations and recordings available to all attendees, and perhaps to the general public but I'm not sure. The Jive team did a fantastic job running the event, I'm hard pressed to think of anything I would suggest they change, my congratulations to everyone involved.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on Jive, Jive World, or the collaboration industry itself.
Tweet
