The Business World Has Jive
A software solution for communication within the business world that strengthens teamwork and makes everyday chores easier – jump into Jive!
Matt Tucker and his Jive co-founder, Bill Lynch, met in high school and both majored in Computer Science at the University of Iowa. Less than a year after graduation, the two graduates decided to collaborate to found Jive in February 2001.
Jive’s roots can be tracked back to Tucker and Lynch’s final days at university, where they created a set of Open Source projects. One of those projects – “a discussion forums application that combined a great feature set with an elegant user experience” – took off promptly and grew immensely popular, putting the steppingstone for Jive in place. While the initial idea was to help companies build online communities that would connect their customers and employees, the shift that the rise of consumer-only social technology brought to the scene had a huge impact.
“We realized we were actually on a much bigger mission to fundamentally improve people's work lives by giving company’s employees, partners and customers better ways to get work done together”
To be more specific, Jive is a cloud-based service that solves most of the problems companies face during a mundane day of work. Things like sending PowerPoint files via e-mail, tracking down people from different departments to get an answer to a time sensitive question or simply interacting with customers can be a drag and quickly become frustrating. Jive software provides companies with an efficient solution to all of these tasks and can be used on computer desktops, iPads and smartphones.
After a tough six years of “bootstrapping”, Jive now offers rapid results for intranet, sales, customer service, marketing, and even governmental tasks. The company’s moved far from its beginning to become the advanced, most complete social business platform it has become.
“In fact, Bill's dad gave him the advice that he'd probably be better off going to work for an established company versus doing a start-up”, but when Jive attracted a first round of venture capital from Sequoia, it really started to scale up.
Another boost for the business came from the “Powered by Jive” logo on the company homepage of Sun Microsystems, Jives’ very first customer.
“We actually incorporated specifically to be able to sell the first version of the product to Sun” – a mix of good calculations and some luck, which led to attention from companies such as T-Mobile, BUPA and Nike, just to name a few.
With their growing success, Tucker and Lynch have been joined by more than 500 staff and are still growing. As it does, its delivered business value can be verified through stats like, sales teams closing more business deals, companies bringing employees on board faster, or customer support teams providing better answers to cases.
“People actually like their jobs more when they use Jive, they feel closer to their colleagues, and they're better at accomplishing their career goals”
Bringing that type of change to company culture seems to be the best side effect that Jive has and in the near future Jive will step up the beat.
“There's a bunch of things we're working on at the moment that I'm super excited about”, Tucker gushes. One of them is a new iPad App, another are the new APIs that will open up Jive to third party developers in some interesting and innovative ways. Further down the line Jive aims at reaching their goal of “fundamentally improving the way people work together” - a superlative teambuilding exercise that is intended to spread across the globe.
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