Global CIO: Can Jive Drive Social Business Software?Global CIO: Can Jive Drive Social Business Software?

Twitter: "With this partnership, Jive customers will have real-time access to Twitter’s complete data stream, including over 65 million tweets each day," a Jive press release says. "They will now be able to quickly address any conversations happening on Twitter in a user-friendly Jive interface." The release adds that while "spotty access to conversations that happen on the social web" can lead to "brand interruption," the Jive-Twitter partnership will give Jive customers "constant, full-picture access to everything that matters on Twitter for faster action and decision-making."

Google Appls Marketplace: "Now, over two million Google Apps business users can activate a no-cost 'Try Jive' trial," Jive said in a release. Noting that Jive's presence on the Google Apps Marketplace will accelerate the possibility of "social business in the cloud," Jive said it expects to find traction among business executives who "have realized that the traditional way of purchasing, deploying and managing software has to change."

CSC: In Jive's wide-ranging partnership with this long-time enterprise heavyweight, CSC will launch a Social Business Practice for clients, develop mobile social-business apps for Jive's customers, and market Jive's new social-business products to CSC customers worldwide. In addition, CSC's becoming a leading reference account as Jive's products are now used by almost 50,000 CSC employees. The CTO at CSC, John Glowacki, said in a statement, "We are committed to enabling the same knowledge sharing, collaboration and productivity gains for our clients that we have seen ourselves internally. As the mobile workforce continues to grow, our expansion into mobile Jive apps will translate that efficiency into the mobile enterprise."

Those are pretty strong endorsements from some leading players. And Chris Lochhead, who's been named to Jive's board and is serving as a strategic advisor to the company, offered this perspective about why Jive believes that CIOs who are already flooded with apps and add-ons and portals and social experiments will be willing to give Jive a shot.

"If you look across the major drivers that businesses are trying to cope with today, it's employees via collaboration, it's customers via loyalty, and it's the social web and all the intelligence it can offer," Lochhead said in a phone conversation. "Some of our competitors can play in one or two of those areas, but not in all three. Jive's products have been built from the beginning to support all three of those initiatives, and that's why we feel we can turn social business in the enterprise from a bunch of disconnected experiments into a real enterprise-level strategic tool."

Lochhead also offered this comparison to an earlier profound change in business models: "The new engagement model is around communities, so whereas companies used to worry about getting Amazoned, now they worry about getting Facebooked."