It's exciting for us to see young companies like Jive grow so fast. But before we pop the champagne bottles, it's important to take these results with a grain of salt. Jive announced today that it had record results for the past year, up 85%. That's impressive in the sense that Jive is proving that its technology is gaining acceptance in the market and the fact that the company, founded in 2001, is almost 10 years old. But we also need to consider that with any young company, there's a lot riding on news like this. Sponsor Jive has some big-league investors . It's critical that Jive shows them that all is going well and the road ahead is paved with gold. That may well be the case. Jive is an important player in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 space. Along with its record revenues, Jive also announced that its bookings are up and its employee count now stands at 200 people, up 50%. Also, its Jive World event in 2010 will be twice as big as last year's. So, hats off to Jive in that regard for showing us, as an example, that its employee count is up. They are doing well, no doubt about it. But we have no idea how the results compare to last year and what the size of these deals look like. Jive does not share this information, as is the case with most private companies. It is up to us to make our own judgements about what's really is meaningful. We made the same point last week about Socialtext posting record results. We were equally curious about its results, too. All of these companies reporting great news is a sign that the Enterprise 2.0 space is growing, but we need to be careful not to get too excited. Young companies can grow very fast. But it's all relative compared to big companies. Numbers can look impressive but more often than not, you need to look at a number of factors before making any quick calls on how the company is actually faring in the market. Discuss

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Enterprise 2.0 Company Results: How Good is Good News?

Jive Software has acquired Filtrbox , a Boulder-based startup that monitors the social Web to help clients understand and better participate in online conversations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Jive sought a social media monitoring company to bring into its Social Business Software (SBS) platform. The goal is to extend the social footprint of the Jive platform. Jive sees the market becoming far more oriented around conversations on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. These conversations affect everything from product development to sales strategies. Monitoring is critical to following and capitalizing on the conversation flow. Sponsor Jive looked at several companies in the space before deciding to approach Filtrbox. The choice came down to the Filtrbox user experience; its collaboration features; the scalable architecture and the social intelligence baked into the product. The Filtrbox architecture may be the greatest value to Jive. Filtrbox Founder Ari Newman said its architecture is a hybrid that leverages the cloud. He would not say much more about it though its business model reflects a cloud based approach. Services that leverage the cloud effectively let users scale up and down, depending on demand. Many charge on a per use basis. Newman said Filtrbox charges $10,000 per year for up to six users. Customers get unlimited use of the platform. How companies leverage the cloud will determine how they fare in the market. The ability to crunch large amounts of data is vital for understanding the real-time nature of how conversations flow. Jive seems to understand this and appears to be moving more toward a cloud-based strategy. Initially, Jive will market Filtrbox through its Jive Market Engagement solution along side Radian6. Jive and Radian6 formed a partnership back in September. Here's what Jeremiah Owyang and his colleague, R "Ray" Wang had to say about the partnership. Radian6 and Filrtrbox are essentially in the same space. it is unclear how the relationship between Jive and Radian6 will be affected by the Filtrbox purchase. Filtrbox will be fully integrated into the Jive SBS platform in the second quarter of this year. Discuss

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Jive Software Buys Filtrbox: A Purchase All About The Social Web

Copia , a new e-book platform, plans to take on the big players in the market by launching its own e-book store and a set of touchscreen e-readers. Copia also wants to combine numerous social networking features with its e-book platform and plans to sell its services to original equipment manufacturers (OEM). Copia's e-book store will offer over 250,000 books from over 1,500 publishers , as well as 1,400 newspapers and over 750,000 free books from Google Books. Sponsor Copia's private, limited-invitation beta will launch this month. The company plans to expand this beta in March. Copia bills itself as a hybrid solution, as the company plans to offer both consumer-facing e-book solutions as well as an open platform for OEMs. Focus on Social Networking Features On the consumer side, Copia wants to differentiate itself from its competition by giving its users a number of social networking tools. Community profiles on Copia, for example, are linked to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition, the service will offer collaboration tools that are mostly geared towards students. Users can highlight and annotate books, for example, and share these annotations with other users. Copia will also implement a rating system for book reviews. OEM's will be able to offer all of these features to their users as well. OEMs will also be able to integrate Copia's e-book store into their own devices. Copia's E-Readers: Ocean and Tidal Copia plans to offer six different e-readers with prices ranging from $199 to $299. The Tidal will offer a six-inch ePaper display and the Ocean will come in a basic six-inch version and two advanced versions with a nine-inch screens. Both of these models will come in three different variations. The most basic models will not offer any wireless connectivity besides Wi-Fi and won't offer a touchscreen. The intermediate models offer touchscreens, and the high-end versions will offer touchscreens and 3G connectivity. All models come with tilt sensors and 4GB of internal memory. These devices will go on sale on Copia's site in April. Can This Work? We still have a lot of questions about Copia. We don't know at what price the company plans to sell books and what DRM-solution Copia plans to implement. At the same time, though, the company's plan to sell both e-books and compatible e-readers looks a lot like Amazon's strategy and there can be no doubt that Amazon has been quite successful with this model. Copia, however, doesn't have any name recognition yet and the e-book market is currently dominated by big companies like Amazon, B&N and Sony. If Copia is successful in getting enough OEM partners, though, it could establish itself as another major player in the market. The company's e-reader lineup also looks like a potential winner. Discuss

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Copia Challenges Amazon, B&N and Sony: Unveils New E-Book Platform and 6 E-Readers

Gartner has acquired the Burton Group for $56 million. The purchase is another example of how the analyst community is becoming increasingly homogeneous, dominated by a handful of firms such as Forrester and IDC. And it points to a growing debate about the value that companies can receive from analyst firms when there is little diversification in the market. But it also points to the importance of independent firms and individuals that engaging in dialogue through blogs and other mediums. Sponsor The Burton Group is based out of Midvale, Utah. Its speciality lies in providing in-depth advice to front-line IT professionals. The firm has 41 research analysts and 40 sales and client service associates, and self-projected 2009 revenue of $30 million. This is Gartner's second acquisition in the past few months. Gartner purchased AMR Research late last year. The Future: A Hybrid Model Analyst firms do not have the sway in the market that they once did. Bloggers are often considered analysts as they often specialize in particular fields, providing in-depth analysis for particular markets. This is not to take anything away from the individual analysts who populate Gartner, Forrester and other groups. We depend on many of them for the insight they give on topics ranging from APIs to web-oriented architecture. But the future of the analyst community looks more like a hybrid animal - a cross between a traditional analyst firm and an online community. RedMonk and the Altimeter Group represent this new hybrid. Both are small, independent firms. RedMonk, for instance, provides in-depth research into markets but they also invest heavily in their blogs, podcasts and other outlets such as the real-time, microblogging world. The Altimeter Group also invests heavily in its community. Technobabble 2.0 recently took a look at a survey done by Jeremiah Owyang to determine the influence of his blog on the overall market. Owyang is a partner with Altimeter. Technobabble's Jonny Bentwood made this conclusion : "The fact that there is any link between the blog and procurement is a massive validation point. Obviously we are taking people's words for this and it would be excellent to have credible evidence to back this up, but this in itself is a huge factoid." SageCircle is a third-party service that provides clients with analysis of analyst firms. SageCircle concludes that the Gartner acquisition does provide a silver lining for independent firms: "The implication for the analyst ecosystem is "not good." Anytime a well-regarded mid-sized advisory firm is swallowed up by another firm it eliminates a valued second voice and opinion about the vendors and markets it covers, and decreases clients' purchasing and negotiating options. However, for competitors like Ovum this does provide a great opportunity to establish themselves as the second - if not the first - source of advice and opinions to IT managers and other technology buyers not comfortable with having only a single source for this type of service." Discuss

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Gartner Acquisition is Good for the Independent Analyst Firms

The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December's stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption. In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests while stats for HTC Magic devices remained static and those for HTC's Dream model actually decreased. In terms of consumer use of the network and acceleration of device popularity, it seems we have a winner. Sponsor Having been compared extensively with the iPhone, the Droid stands up solidly even under extensive scrutiny . And in terms of 3G network access, we've personally seen fewer issues than with any other mobile carrier we've tried to date. (Note: I'm a Droid owner and a former iPhone user. I've also suffered through my share of BlackBerries, Palms and their ilk.) If any device is to become the iPhone killer, it will be the Droid or something very close to it (here's looking at you, Nexus One). AdMob's numbers show that requests from all Android-driven devices increased by 97 percent between October to December in 2009, totaling more than 1 billion requests in December alone. The open platform has also seen a refreshing diversity of devices and manufacturers. AdMob shows that in December, 56 percent of requests were from HTC devices, 39 percent were from Motorola devices and 5 percent were manufactured by from Samsung. And in December, seven devices generated more than three percent of requests each: the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid Eris and the Samsung Moment. This stat represents a significant increase from just three devices in October (HTC Dream, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero). Already, the Motorola Droid is the leading Android device on AdMob's radar, generating a third of all the network's requests in December. Released just under two months ago, it's already the top-selling Android device on the market, a title it's held since a scant fortnight after its launch . Granted, AdMob's metrics show a small slice of mobile device usage. But they've consistently been reliable in showing what mobile users use and need and in predicting trends. We are internally excited about what Android-powered devices will do in the market in the months to come, and I am personally quite optimistic about Droid adoption specifically. Let us know what you think in the comments, particularly if you're a fanboy or fangirl of a particular device! Discuss

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Droid's December Boom: AdMob Metrics Show Android Platform's Growth

Collaboration services targeted for the small business market often seem more like software suites than web-based services with deep linking capabilities and tag-based environments. For example, the new offering from HyperOffice focuses on features that are fundamental to small business operations but lacks the advanced capabilities that we see from a number of Enterprise 2.0 services. Is this a good thing? Is this due to the domination of document-based systems that have traditionally been such a part of the small business world? Sponsor We are torn on this one. We see a number of companies offering services such as real-time collaboration environments. Still, the portal mindset seems to have such a hold on the small business market. HyperOffice looks like it is providing a service that has value for the small business. But like others we have seen, HyperOffice feels monolithic. It provides the capability to create personal and group environments but extensions to the web are limited. In some respects this may be just the right approach. HyperOffice users may not want the capability to build data mashups and tie into services like Twitter. The company points out that the market is flooded with Web 2.0 style point tools. The HyperOffice platform is a one-stop shop. This may be smart as the company is targeting Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Notes users. A SaaS like HyperOffice may be enticing, perhaps even more because it has similar functionality to the offerings from the big players in the market. The HyperOffice UI resembles a Microsoft Office environment. The main page includes icons such as desktop, mail and calendar. The features are basic but provide a clear functionality for the user. HyperOffice has personal and group settings. Groups may share calendar items, collaborate on documents and other tasks. Additional features include tasks, notes, a wiki and the ability to search Google and Yahoo! from within the application. Here's an overview of the service: Google Apps and Zoho provide a deeper web experience than HyperOffice. But there is definite value here for the company looking for an affordable, CRM service. Pricing starts at $7 per user, per month. Discuss

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Why Do Small Business Services Sometimes Lack Sophistication?

In his keynote this morning, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff continued his critique on software companies for their lack of development and sense of entitlement. And not surprisingly, the full-on pitch continued for cloud computing with a parade of executives showing the applications they developed on Force.com . About 19,000 people attended Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com event. Partners lined up to get on stage. David Girouard of Google showed a map with all their customers around the globe. He recounted a story with Eric Schmidt, who was astounded by the frustrations that CIO's expressed about the architecture they inherited. An Accenture executive said that cloud computing is here to stay. He showed the company's applications on Force.com . The Black Crowes performed last night. The pitch is fever high. Sponsor What does this all say about the market? Is this an event that marks the point where cloud computing goes mainstream? Have we reached the apex of cloud computing hype? I asked the question on Twitter: Gartner sees the hype this way: Regardless, this has been a monumental week for cloud computing. The long established software companies have now lined up with their offering. Microsoft launched Azure . Salesforce.com unveiled Salesforce Chatter , Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2. IBM announced a cloud analytics platform that leverages Cognos, its business intelligence suite. The more established companies carry the benefit of long established customer channels. IBM and Microsoft fit into this camp. Additionally, Microsoft appears to get it. The Azure platform integrates some open-source components. These companies face their own challenges as much internally as from the customer world. But their presence also means that cloud computing is close to being accepted in the enterprise mainstream. Salesforce.com is a more interesting animal. Benioff is a very aggressive CEO. Business Week is calling him " The King of the Cloud." He is never shy to lampoon the established software companies in the market. He calls out his competitors like Sugar CRM , which is fighting right back with its own campaign: Behind The Smokescreen , a play on Benioff's new book: "Behind The Cloud." Benioff has to show off his partners. He never misses an opportunity to tell you how many customers he has. In a way, he has to play this role. He has the big players running. He has to keep them running, on the defensive, so he can move in with Chatter across the enterprise. That's the trick right now for Benioff. Moving as fast as he possibly can to gain that permanent traction. The hype is peaking. It's a different game for the entire market. It's a race now to win the mainstream. Discuss

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Cloud Computing: Where to Next?