Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals

Intranet Journal Q&A with Jive Software

Tom Dunlap

10/19/2006

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.

Recent Messaging and Collaboration Articles

Don't Rely on E-mail During Crunch Time Central Desktop: A Step Ahead of Collaborators SocialText's Latest Open Source Wiki a Hit

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.

When you say discussions, blogs, wikis, ratings, this is just obviously the continuation of consumer technologies becoming more into the enterprise?

Certainly. I was just at the Office 2.0 conference last week. A lot of people are thinking about how do you apply all of these Web 2.0 trends. A lot of which is hot air, but there's some real stuff in there, too. You know, making the applications easier to use, more focused on end user, focused on collaboration so that it's easier to apply groups working on problems such as tagging. Share my tags with everybody and see what people are browsing. That's a good example of bringing collaboration to a process that just didn't have it before.

So definitely that's part of what we're doing. Bringing more of these things that have been adopted by consumers into business. But not in a way that embraces hype. In a way that actually solves business problems.

So the most I've heard about IM in a long time, and this might seem like it's out of left field, but the old Mark Foley intern page scandal.

Uh-huh.

The pages saving the IMs … I think that's …

When not to archive (laughs). I think that's an interesting question. Gartner has actually said don't archive unless you have to. The issue for a lot of organizations is that now they are subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, and if they have financial data that's going over their IM network or their email network, for example, then legally they have to do some archiving. So I think that companies, and, uh, senators … people should be smart about what they do with their data. You want to find the best mix of protecting privacy and also archiving for legal reasons.

So tell me about how open source IM products are disrupting the proprietary IM market.

People are looking for a couple of things from the open source perspective. They're attracted by lower licensing fees, and that drives a lot of adoption. But they also want a more customizable platform.

One example of that is the state of Kentucky [Kentucky's Homeland Security Office]. What they want to do is deploy IM to all of their emergency vehicles. And they needed the ability to -- a very simple feature -- the ability to do night-vision mode. So that if you're in a squad car at night, you don't want a whole bunch of white background with black text, because it kind of washes out your night vision. And so they needed the ability to click a button and make everything in more muted colors. … Because we've built the client and the server to be very customizable … it was very easy to do that customization for them.

That's a very interesting and unusual example. Night vision? And you couldn't do that with a proprietary IM?

My understating is that they actually tried to do it with Microsoft's product - maybe not that feature specifically - but they tried to adapt Microsoft's solution, and you know it just wasn't as flexible. So open source gets you flexibility. Not just the ability to get into the source code, but because we built it to be a very customizable, flexible platform with things like plug-in support. But also lower licensing fees.

What's happened on the email side is that companies have become locked into Exchange from Microsoft. … And they want more choice. They want some alternatives. And so they're looking around. What's reasonable to use. What has a good feature set. What's not too expensive.

email this page

Tutorials XML Basics and Benefits Removing Spyware Build a PHP CMS Microsoft's SharePoint and more at: Intranet Journal's Tutorials

Intranet Journal Favorites Creating a PHP-Based Content Management System The Spyware Guide Introduction to Microsoft SharePoint Portal

Intranet Journal Part of the EarthWeb Network Managing Editor Intranet Journal Tom Dunlap EarthWeb Home Page Jupitermedia Home Page Media Kit