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Matt Tucker, CTO Jive Software

Instant messaging, both in the public domain and in the enterprise, has been surging in popularity and innovation of late. And then came Mark Foley.

Factor in the scandal involving the notorious instant messages sent by the former representative from Florida, and you have a perfect IM storm.

There are many players in the IM field, but a little company in Portland, Ore. -- Jive Software -- is making some serious waves. The 30-employee company has existed for five-and-a-half years. It's been one of the innovators in open source IM products for the enterprise, as well as flexible, open-architecture collaboration software for use in businesses.

Jive's open source enterprise instant messaging product, Wildfire, is giving the big guns (Microsoft, et al) a run for their money. Wildfire recently won the 2006 ServerWatch Innovation award for best real time communication server, capturing more votes than Microsoft LCS 2005, IBM Lotus SameTime, and Antepo OPN XT combined.

Intranet Journal talked with Jive CTO Matt Tucker about next-generation collaboration tools, Microsoft SharePoint, open source IM, a night-vision conundrum in Kentucky, Mark Foley, and more.

Intranet Journal: Tell me about Jive Software and its products.

Matt Tucker: We've been around five-and-a-half years. We have two major areas we're focused on. We're a collaboration company; we focus on next-generation collaboration tools. Our two areas of focus are real-time, which is essentially instant messaging right now but growing into the larger real-time landscape, which we can talk about in a minute. And then what we call community collaboration, which has primarily been our Jive Forums discussion forum product, which is used by Apple, IBM, Oracle, Sun, a lot of large companies as well as entertainment companies, as well as for a lot of internal collaboration. And where that product is going is a mix of discussion, blogs, and wikis in an integrated environment, with a lot of related features, and so it will actually be much closer to what (Microsoft) SharePoint offers.

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How does Microsoft SharePoint fit in this market?

They're probably not as strong on the next-generation collaboration features, which is where we're coming from. … That type of collaboration is starting to merge with real-time as well. People want to be able to go back and forth between the asynchronous and synchronous collaboration in a more seamless way.

There's kind of the defined niche of IM, but I think where the industry is going … real time collaboration is going to become more embedded, more contextual. … Over the next year there will definitely be a lot more convergence. And I think that's what you're going to see from Microsoft as well. They're going to be integrating a lot of presence [define] and real-time features into SharePoint, I would expect.

What do you think they'll do with SharePoint?

Where they're going with their real-time strategy is more unified, real-time collaboration. So you don't just have instant messaging, you have voice integration, you have video, you have application sharing, all that's converging. And at the same time adding in real-time collaboration features into Office. So you can see who's authored a document, send versions of that document in real-time between each other. I don't quite know how far along they are with that feature, but they've certainly talked about that. That's a lot of what we're focusing on as well.

… I think there's a lot of interesting things to talk about in terms of the more open alternative to SharePoint. If you don't go with SharePoint, what do you go with? How do you actually take advantage of all these next-generation technologies that people are talking about with blogs and wikis and actually apply them to solve business problems.

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