HP is now the primary supplier of hardware for Microsoft's private-cloud initiative. The $250 million partnership calls for the two companies to align on sales, engineering and professional services.

Microsoft is pushing a strategy that looks similar to the approach that made it the multi-billion dollar company it is today.

Now comes the age of the cloud. Microsoft is focusing on making its software the core technology, integrated tightly with HP hardware. It's conceivable that the approach may work, especially in a virtualized environment.

HP's role is to provide the data center hosting services, networking gear and servers for the Azure platform. Applications will be optimized for HP's Converged Infrastructure. Companies may choose to deploy the platform in HP's container environment.

You can imagine the capital expenditures for these deployments. But it's also one of the realities of today's market. There is a class of the enterprise that wants this type of controlled environment. And then there are the hosting providers that serve a wide variety of customers who also want a contained environment.

But open source in the enterprise continues to gain acceptance as does it in the cloud. This week's news that Rackspace is open-sourcing its cloud infrastructure means there is the potential for a new network of open cloud offerings. Its promise is a level of interoperability that can not be attained in a virtualized network.

Once a customer commits to Windows Azure Appliance they are pretty much saying that Windows Azure will be its core cloud service. It will mean that they have to rely on the software and hardware development from Microsoft and HP engineers. It's powerful but not open-source by any means.

Cloud computing is a revolution. You get that sense at an event like last night's Cloudcamp here at OSCON. So much is changing.

But revolutions do not happen overnight. In the meantime, the existing power structure in the enterprise will be looking to extend the scope of what they do. And for many, that means a more complex, more virtualized data center. That's good news for Microsoft and HP.

The wild card? How soon the revolution will take to play out.

The funding is one of the most sizable investments we have seen by any measure in the social enterprise community.

It's validating that a company focused on social product development tools can receive such a large amount of funding, and it shows the demand in the enterprise for tools that include a collaborative, social component.

Its success shows that the enterprise is adopting social tools. Product development is a social process. It makes sense to use tools that have that functionality.

Atlassian will use the funding for mergers and acquisitions, marketing, and deeper, more involved participation in local communities where developers congregate. It will look for companies that fit into the product development cycle. The goal is to offer a full, soup-to-nuts solution for product development. There are a lot of these little companies that could fit that profile. These include tools for code review, quality assurance and a host of other uses.

Atlassian got its start in 2002. It was founded by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar in Sydney, Australia. Both will continue to work as co-CEOs. Self-funded, the company has been profitable since its start.

Atlassian has 225 employees based in Australia, North America and Europe.

The concept of curation can also be applied to the often-forgotten world of product documentation.

According to the company, the resulting MindTouch 2010 is the first product documentation environment to integrate what it calls "curation analytics" - a process that gives customers the ability to analyze their documentation by quality, relative age and its correlation to customer behavior, either in aggregate or by specific topics.

For most companies, product documentation is a desktop-oriented task. Manuals are created, and online they will often be static PDF documents. If baked into a website, they will remain there, written in static HTML.

MindTouch 2010 is a multi-user XML-driven editing platform which publishes documentation in a Web-based format and uses semantics to match content. Its engine provides the capability to adapt to customer behaviors, and the product is available on-premise or as a hosted solution.

As users contribute to the documentation, the natural language they use becomes part of what search engines discover. In turn, the product team can bring up information from the users to amplify messages.

Product documentation is another example of how a Web-oriented environment can transform processes that have languished for years in static repositories.

It's an approach that makes documentation more accessible. By leveraging the Web, users become contributors, not just consumers. The user adds a deeper level of richness to the documentation. Add analytics into the environment, and you can see how a continuous loop can form that feeds on the additional data, adds context and provides the curated results back to the developer and online, where it can be discovered.

Product documentation has been a desktop-oriented environment for decades. It has been primarily the domain of technical communicators, with the market served by companies like Adobe.

Can MindTouch 2010's curation analytics cause a deep enough disruption so that it is perceived as important enough to move from the technical world to strategic marketing?

The concept for curation analytics seems right. The big challenge MindTouch faces is convincing marketers that product documentation is important enough to merit their attention.

Bloomberg Business Week reported today that Well Fargo took two years to support the iPhone. But this spring, the company approved the iPad in the span of a few weeks. Mercedes is thinking of iPads for its 350 U.S. dealerships.

The iPad is an iconic product that people want to use at home and at work. But this is business we're talking about. And what can make or break a product in a business environment?

Wells Fargo attributes its fast acceptance of the iPad to this very reason. Sure it looks good. But how many enterprises out there are more interested in looks than security? Not many.

The iPad has almost all the attributes of a secure, enterprise ready device. It now has 256 bit encryption. Both the iPhone and the iPad support Microsoft Exchange. As Chickbits wrote in a blog post yesterday:

"...and you can configure strong passwords, password expiration, password reuse history, max failed login attempts, auto-lock and remote wipe. You can also create and deploy configuration profiles using the iPhone Configuration Utility that control installation of apps and user interaction. This is very useful if your business has to abide by compliance regulations. You can even create a password protected profile that cannot be removed by the user."

For people working remotely, Chickbits adds there are Citrix SSL VPN and Citrix apps available in the Apps store to enable remote access. Two-factor authentication support is already built-in.

But the iPad is not fool proof and it may give the competition a bit of an edge. As Bloomberg points out, a breach on the AT&Tweb site lead to the leak of 114,000 Apple iPad email addresses.

From Bloomberg:

"Apple aims to keep its products secure in part by carefully vetting the applications that can be downloaded onto it. Still, the process is "not foolproof, it will be subverted eventually," said Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of Helsinki-based security firm F-Secure."

Companies like Hewlett-Packard, LG Electronics Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. plan to launch tablet computers. Cisco is releasing a tablet that leverages its strength in video. It will provide the capability to do video conferencing.

These companies have inherent strengths. They have long histories with enterprise customers. They sell into IT departments all the time.

But they don't have Apple's buzz nor do they have the sex appeal.

But this is the enterprise. And even if the iPad is secure, Apple is viewed as a consumer focused company. At this point, it's hard to tell if that is a hindrance or not.

Or does it? Amazon IT is really like any other IT department. It has a mix of different systems and processes that have developed over the past several years. It's a global organization that has thousands of employees who depend on the IT infrastructure to manage finances, human resources and all the other functions in the enterprise.

For the past four years, Amazon IT has been working toward a move to the cloud. Along the way it has gone through the process that many companies are now also experiencing.

The post provides insights into similar issues that IT directors face in moving to the cloud. It's her special status as someone who actually works for a company that specializes in cloud computing that makes her story different.

Drinking Her Company's Own Champagne

Boden has the luxury of working for a company with n-house expertise about cloud computing. But she still had to evaluate her employer in some ways as she would a third party vendor. What she experienced is a case study for anyone going through the process of choosing a cloud computing provider.

Boden says she did not have to adopt cloud computing. There was no directive from Jeff Bezos. She claims it was a business decision but also says she felt it was a lesson in "drinking her own champagne." We like that analogy far more than the one we hear from other companies about eating their own dog food. Yuck. Makes Amazon appear like they are of a higher class than the competition.

In the post from SearchCloudComputing, Boden said Amazons' enterprise portfolio includes Oracle E-Business Suite Financials software for reporting and business process needs. It also uses Appian for business process management and BMC for systems management.

Virtualization Played An Important Role

She said they decided to start internally by consolidating and virtualizing the IT environment. That's an example of good maintenance and organization as it helped get things in order before switching to the cloud. She said the effort provided more flexibility in where and how applications could be deployed and served.

Right now, Boden is in the preliminary stages of moving into AWS. She has started with simple, homegrown applications. The more critical aspects of the IT operation will move later. Finance will be last.

The planning began a year ago. It will most likely be another 18 months before the process is completed.

She said the biggest challenge is security and compliance. She said she would not have considered moving the company's financial applications to the cloud before last Fall. That's when Amazon began offering its virtual private cloud service. It's essentiailly a virtual private network, cut off from the public Internet. It also helps that Amazon has recently completed a major security audit.

But in the end, it's the people that make it all come together. She had had to negotiate with her auditors, assuring compliance. She had to help her IT department learn how to manage applications in a cloud enviroment.

Making her Sarbanes-Oxley applications fully virtualized and certified made it all a bit easier.

The lesson? Boden lowered the barriers. Virtualization smoothed out the process. In the end, she was prepared to drink her own champagne and move to the cloud.

Unified communications is the convergence of voice, data, instant messaging and presence technologies. It is one of the broadest terms that we come across but it is providing context as collaboration services and mobile technologies leverage the social Web.

HP is seeking to gain on Cisco in the networking market by focusing on unified communications through interoperability efforts and alliances. It sees Web 2.0 technologies as messaging systems that can go to any device through any network.

In terms of alliances, HP and Avaya have entered into a three-year partnership. HP will sell Avaya's Unffied Communications solutions, including Avaya's Aura plarform. Avaya is the leading vendor in the VOIP market. Avaya Aura launched last year. it provides the control of voice, video, messaging, presence and Web applications.

HP also has partnerships with Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft to provide networking and unified communications.

HP's is forming these alliances with multiple partners as the enterprise market opens and the capabilities for using Facebook, Twitter and other services become ways to communicate through voice networks.

That is coupled with the deeper use of collaboration and mobile technologies.

According to IDC, the number of mobile workers worldwide will reach almost 1.2 billion. That's in large part due to the migration to unified communications.

The collaboration space is also expected to boom. But there's a catch. There are few, if any, collaboration standards. That can make any integration a process that requires matching vendors capabilities. Plug and play is still pretty much a concept.

As Mike Vizard points out:

"Right now, the few standards that exist in the collaboration space are built mostly around existing messaging protocols and growing industry support for SIP. But not all vendors implement even these standards equally well, and the providers of online services are notorious for providing APIs with limited data-sharing capabilities. That means that IT services companies in this space such as IBM, Avaya and Siemens, which will shortly demonstrate some interoperability between its unified communications platform and Twitter, are being asked to do the heavy lifting by building custom connectors between services."

That's in large part why a company like HP needs to form alliances. Customers need to know the networking vendors they pick can make the connection to Web 2.0 services.

We say this as it's evident that both the public and the private sector are often mired in IT environments that continually require additional resources just to run. People are in so deep that it makes sense to do the same thing over and over again.

The dynamics of why failure so often occurs can be analyzed by viewing the issue in terms of behavioral economics. Michael Krigsman wrote about the issue last week on IT Project Failures.

That's the perception at least. From Krigsman's post:

"Harvard Magazine begins a discussion of behavioral economics by exploding the myth of purely rational decision-making:

Economic Man makes logical, rational, self-interested decisions that weigh costs against benefits and maximize value and profit to himself. Economic Man is an intelligent, analytic, selfish creature who has perfect self-regulation in pursuit of his future goals and is unswayed by bodily states and feelings. And Economic Man is a marvelously convenient pawn for building academic theories. But Economic Man has one fatal flaw: he does not exist."

At some point, the problem becomes so overwhelming and complex that it rally is folly and insanity to approach it the same way.

Lexus Australia is a prime example. According to ZDnet Australia, the company had nine suppliers and seven databases for its CRM environment.

The situation became so unwieldy that it could not manage. Data came in at different times and in different formats. The supplier would keep throwing resources at the problem.

Lexus moved its system to the cloud. The new method worked. The results are evident. According to ZDNet, before, a data extract took on average four days. Now it takes 10 minutes. Responses to queries used to take a day minimum, now it's an hour maximum. Annual savings are at 43 per cent already this year.

The laws of behavioral economics apply in almost any IT project. Companies and organizations in the public sector often require multiple departments to work together, each with its own goals and requirements.

The results can be disastrous. The key is in understanding the biases before they become so ingrained that even the worst of situations seem normal.

is that what makes the cloud so intriguing? is it why Enterprise 2.0 does get people excited?

Both the cloud and the movement behind Enterprise 2.0 follow complete different paths to IT Nirvana than more traditional processes. Those who follow these routes are showing results. That's refreshing and it's infectious. Perhaps even enough so to change behavior so fundamental change can actually occur.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. BigFix has received $33 million in venture financing since its beginnings in 1997. Bloomberg estimates the acquisition price at $400 million.

BigFix is based out of Emeryville, Ca. It provides security intelligence software for managing an enterprise across its computing endpoints, meaning its personal computers, servers and desktops. For example, it can monitor if a PC is out of compliance, needs security fixes or requires an update.

BigFix competes primarily with Microsoft and Symantec in the security world.

IBM's message about a smarter planet plays into this latest acquisition. IBM is building its own vision of a smart data center. In this latest acquisition it means the automation in some respects of the admin process required for the thousands of endpoints in an enterprise environment.

It also has a "green," angle to it as its technology can provide energy savings.

Douglas Washburn of Forrester:

"So why is PC power management important to IBM customers?

While IBM already offers its customers energy-efficient servers and their "Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management" software for the data center, bigger opportunities for savings exist across distributed IT assets, like PCs, monitors, phones, and printers. In fact, Forrester finds that distributed IT assets consume 55% of IT's total energy footprint versus only 45% in the data center. And the extent of these savings can add up. For example, BigFix cites a large US public school district with 80,000 PCs saving $2.1 million in annual energy costs (or $26 per PC per year) using BigFix's Power Management software."

The survey reflects a pattern that's best illustrated by Red Hat's most recent financial results. In the past year, its revenues were up 20%. All parts of its business are showing growth, with particular strength in middleware. The company signed the largest deal in its history during the last quarter. According to Datamation, Red Hat renewed all of its top 25 deals during the quarter at over 120% of their original value.

Some of the other findings in the survey:

Open source is on a trajectory to become dominant over the next 10 years. That's great news for companies like Red Hat, which are already seeing the upside in revenues that comes with open-source adoption.

The making of an animated film is a look into the changing world of networking and its importance in the making of just about anything these days.

That's the issue Dreamworks faces. Today it was announced the studio has chosen Hewlett-Packard to revamp the networking infrastructure so it can efficiently produce films such as Shrek.

Dreamworks is in the business of making animated films. The studio has to have the ability to make films efficiently. In many respects, the number of films that Dreamworks produces in a year is dependent on how well it can use its network to do the core processing of the animated characters it is producing.

It's a similar comparison to what we see with the real-time Web. The Internet is at the center of a dynamic supply chain that requires real-time information to be delivered to the right people in the supply chain as events occur.

The challenges are similar in a studio where the network is at the center of the film production process.

The evidence is in the credits of any animated film. The number of specialists required to make an animated film represents the bulk of the people employed to produce it. The network is critical for these people to do their work. It's at the center of the film production process.

The Dreamworks story is a window into the new networking reality. The studios face challenges with producing high-quality films quickly and efficiently. For mot enterprises the challenges are different. They are not processing animated characters. Instead the increasing challenge is the structured and unstructured data that has to be organized, stored and shared.

Networks are at the center of that issue, too. Companies like HP are betting on the premise that the data center network requires a converged infrastructure to manage the complexities of the Web oriented enterprise.

The battle is for the network.

Until now, Google Apps permitted one domain per account. That has become an issue, especially for larger organizations, migrating employees on multiple domains. Companies would either set up other domains as domain aliases or set up different Google Apps accounts for each domain.

Source: !escunid Online Business Development

The new multi-domain support is an admin control that allows people on different domains to keep their email addresses but see co-workers from other domains in the organization's global address book.

Multiple domain support is a standard of Microsoft Exchange. Multiple domain support is offered through its online services but there are limits on the number of domains available.

Zoho also supports multiple domains. According to Raju Vegesna:

"A typical business has multiple domains associated (imagine RWW having readwriteweb.com, rww.com, rrweb.com etc). Now you may want to create email addresses, subdomains etc for each of these domains. Supporting multiple domains lets you do things like create aliases that work with all domains. For example, you have alexw@readwriteweb.com, but you can easily create aliases so that alexw@rww.com and alexw@rrweb.com can point to your actual email address.

There are several other advantages with supporting multiple domains. In our case, we have three divisions (Zoho, ManageEngine, WebNMS etc). For each of the divisions, we have separate email addresses with that domain name and then sub-domains, product names etc. Managing all these from a single console is a unified experience. That is how we internally use it. But we have several customers who use it in other ways."

Multiple domain support is available for Google Apps Premiere and Education edition users at no additional charge.

Dion Hinchcliffe calls the Enterprise 2.0 conference a "must attend" event in the enterprise social software space. That's true. And we agree that it comes down to the people who attend.

"... If there is someone you'd like to catch up with or get to know in the Enterprise 2.0 community, this just about the best place to do it, since virtually everyone in the industry will be there. And it's not just well-known bloggers. Real live practitioners who are implementing E2.0 are in attendance more than any other event I know of. Or perhaps you'd like to catch up with a particular E2.0 vendor. There's a very good chance you can talk to the actual founder or product manager of your favorite enterprise social tool or service; a great many of them will be on the show floor, on panels, or roaming the halls. The informal Enterprise 2.0 "lobby-con", the endless parade of well-known faces in the main foyer outside the conference area, is also invariably both amazing and useful. It's a literal who's who of the E2.0 industry. Last but not least, this year's outstanding speaker list stands on its own. In the end, half the value of the conference -- in my book anyway -- is because of who is attending that you can actually meet and speak with."

But why such vendor focus?

Hinchcliffe said in one of the last sessions of the conference that there are more than 200 vendors in the Enterprise 2.0 space. He said that this vendor rich environment was apparent at the conference.

That may be a big part of the dynamics in play. Vendors come to an event like Enterprise 2.0 because they know that it is the event to attend.

The antidote may just be actual practitioners. It's not unusual for young markets to have too many vendors compared to the actual number of users. As more practitioners enter the space it's our hope that there will be more reasons for the discussions to be more thoughtful.

SXSW, for instance, gets a heavy influx of vendors but the users are so numerous that the event just brims with conversation.

It's wrong to say that there was a void in discussion at the conference. The people who organize the tracks for the conference do a fantastic job. There were plenty of very happy attendees who came away feeling like the event was useful and very much worth attending.

The people who work for vendors are smart people. They add an important element to the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Our only hope is they learn that a keynote will be remembered far more for the discussion that it provokes more than the demo they do of their newest product.

The service, now in beta, uses the work done on the Twitter annotations spec to create a social layer that makes events in systems readable both by machines and human. The connector serves as a bridge between an on-premise or cloud-based enterprise application.

It's the machine-to-machine communication that makes this most significant. In many respects it's a reminder of how far we have come since the first versions of RSS became such an integral part of the Web. RSS, Atom and other syndication technologies have shown us how the Web can be programmed for machines to communicate, trigger events and provide us with information and insights for our daily work.

It's that connection which makes annotations powerful. Apps can be connected by providing, to use a metaphor, an invisible thread that finds the event and pulls it to the surface.

But is this new? It's similar to Salesforce.com's activity stream that surfaces events from the Force.com platform. It's also similar to Socialcast, which pulls in updates from legacy applications into an activity stream.

The annotations that Socialtext is adopting is part of a deeper effort to build on the work done in recent years to preserve what many call the open Web. The Socialtext news is also a sign that the enterprise is advancing faster with activity streams than their consumer counterparts.

Today, the Web is transforming in a way that requires machines to better communicate. This is especially true in the enterprise where the Web is the network that operates both internally and externally to systems of multiple varieties, such as wireless networks and fast emerging smart systems. One trillion sensors will emerge in the next five years on everything from smart meters to heart devices. That means the Web becomes just a part of the Internet, serving as a system to connect other systems.

Socialtext co-founder Ross Mayfield says activity streams are quickly evolving into application streams. As more software emerges so will be the need to connect machines to trigger events. People will be notified through this complex network.

Socialtext Connect will provide the ability for events from these systems to be passed as a message that people or machines can subscribe to and follow. An application could subscribe to another application that triggers an event such as a reminder to a system to replenish an inventory system.

These "app bots," as Mayfield calls them, serve as an environment for messaging.

Michael Cote, an analyst with Red Monk, made the point in conversation that there is this new interest in messaging services. Annotations fit that bill to some extent.

Is middleware the new hot stuff? It is starting to seem that way as the need continues for that special glue that can connect all aspects of the dynamic supply chain.

Cisco's collaboration suite is focused on video and instant messaging. "Presence," is baked into all aspects of the service, which distinguishes it apart in this increasingly crowded space.

• Cisco Quad is a collaborative service that will be available later this year.
• Cisco Prosumer Video integrates Cisco FocalPoint, an online video workspace with a business-class Cisco Flip MinoPRO camcorder.
• Cisco WebEx Connect IM is now browser-based with capabilities for integrating the IM service into third-party web applications.

There's an interesting thread that flows through this news that reflects on the overall networking space. Video is a driver for networking traffic. It will continue to be a major aspect of overall network traffic in the enterprise.

Cisco is facing this market opportunity by offering collaboration services and devices that connect to the network. Hewlett-Packard will continue to offer devices that complement its network infrastructure. The Palm acquisition provides HP with its own Web OS and the tablets and other device to go with it. As the Web continues its march into the enterprise, we expect that this combination will be a part of how HP and companies like Cisco approach the market.

For the purposes of the E2.0 conference, let's take a look at the Cisco strategy to gain a bit of insight into how the landscape is shaping for one of the giants of the networking world.

Cisco Quad

A core tenant of Cisco Quad is its cross-integration with the company's voice and video business. Cisco's goal is to make video a communication that is as easy as video. it includes an activity stream and other standards that we are seeing emerge. For example, people may use Quad as a microbloging tool for internal use. Messages can go to Twitter, too.

Altimeter Group's analyst Ray Wang compares Cisco's efforts to unified strategies from other major players in the space. Project Vulcan is an IBM initiative launched earlier this year:

But competition means a wholly different thing these days. Competitors are collaborators, too. Cisco's software collaboration tools will eventually integrate with Microsoft Sharepoint, Oracle and other document management environments like Documentum. Cisco Quad will also eventually wok with Google's OpenSocial.

Prosumer Video

It's perhaps the Flip camera integration that reflects most about Cisco's foray into the social technology landscape.Video is core to the Cisco mission, complementing its dominance in the networking space. Video bolsters use of the network, making the Flip camera a tool to strengthen Cisco's data services. In some respects the Flip is like a loss leader, acting as the means for delivering data to the network.

Cisco sees video as a core collaborative exercise. It is increasingly used as a means for providing context, be it personal or for showing products.

Prosumer Video includes a new online video workspace called FocalPoint and a new camera designed for business use: the four-hour Flip MinoPRO camcorder. The Focal Point service is designed for groups to share video over a cloud-based network. Its an end-to-end secure network. The Flip, like all previous models, has its editing software built-in to the camera.

Cisco WebEx Connect 6.5

Cisco WebEx Connect is now in the browser, making it a fully accessible IM environment. It's like GTalk or any other browser-based IM service. It's localized now for several languages. Logs can be compiled for purposes of compliance.

Jabbr makes the latest update of most interest. Developers may now integrate Jabbr into Web application with Cisco's Ajax XMPP library. That's a step for Cisco into the murky and shifting currents that come with building a developer community.

How Cisco builds a developer community is a big question mark. Murali Sitarem has lead the effort for Cisco's enterprise collaboration development. It has been a two year process, marked recently by the acquisition of Tandberg. It's acquisitions like that of Tandberg and Jabbr that Sitarem says will be the key to building a developer community. Sitarem says the company will see systems integrators and developers with deeper IT experience.

But from our view, Cisco will have to provide incentives, which they appear to be doing. Their recruitment program gives fresh technology graduates from the top engineering schools the option of working on any project they wish when joining Cisco. Recruiting young people makes sense as they are digital natives who inherently understand the social networks that stand as models for today's enterprise social technology initiatives.

But how is Cisco going to make it appealing to attract a wide network of developers? The answer may come with Jabbr and Tandberg. But it will take a lot more to build a developer community. A network is not born overnight.

The news is in timing with Enterprise 2.0, the conference for the social enterprise that runs through Thursday this week in Boston. In addition to the Twitter news, Jive is launching an apps marketplace; integrating its service into Google Apps Marketplace and offering a new dashboard environment that serves for aggregating data from multiple sources.

Jive is one of the first enterprise technology companies to offer the Twitter Firehose. The term "firehose," is used as Jive is getting 100% of Twitter's stream of data, equal to about 65 million tweets per day. That's a super stream of information that has usually been relevant only to search-style companies.

Jive did not disclose what it is paying for access to the full Twitter stream of information. The price for Twitter Firehose has to some extent been guided by the size of the company that is licensing the service. Twitter has said before that it will be standardizing the price for licensing the user data stream. In the meantime, it is reported that the cost of the license is relatively inexpensive.

Earlier this year, Jive acquired Filtrbox, a social monitoring technology company. The acquisition shines some light on how Jive may use the Firehose. Filtrbox historically leveraged the cloud by charging customers for access to the platform. It's a model that provides a basic way for Jive to give access to the data stream. Customers could use the service as much or as little as they wish.

Aggregated Dashboard

Any pure data stream is useless without some ways to filter and curate large amounts of data that can be delivered to the right people at the right time. "Jive What Matters," acts as an activity stream that is personalized to provide a wide stream of data, tailored to the user. According to Jive, this may be internal or external data. It could be direct messages. It also includes a summary of what the user may need to do. This could include action items, alerts, and critical project notifications. A recommendation engine is built into the new offering, helping users get access to information that may be relevant to the stream of information they are being fed in the activity stream.

Jive What Matters reminds us of MindTouch and its framework for provding aggregated views of information. The differentiating factor for Jive may well be its new recommendation engine, which can act as a parallel curation service within the Jive environment.

Jive Apps Market will give developers access to Jive's core functionality. Jive will launch its developer community in September at its annual conference. At that time it will provide full documentation for an open API, giving access for the first time to the Jive platform.

The service will integrate with Google's Open Social framework. It will offer the ability to offer apps within the Jive platform. Jive will provide access to platform data such as groups, enterprise social graphs and activity streams.

This opens up Jive as a service that can fit with other enterprise ecosystems. A number of service providers in the Enterprise 2.0 space currently offer integration with third-party services. Google AND Salesforce.com are examples of companies that have built their own apps platforms. In many respects it's becoming standard practice to offer a platform for third-party developers.

Google Apps Marketplace

Jive's online version of its Social Business Software (SBS) will be available in Google Apps Marketplace. The marketplace is now host to thousands of apps. A number of social enterprise companies have integrated with Google Apps. Atlassian, for example, has had considerable success by integrating with the service.

Summary

Jive is banking on the new data explosion in the enterprise and the effect that loosely coupled environments can have in a dynamic social supply chain.

But will companies need a Twitter Firehose? It's undoubtedly true that social data is affecting how companies work. But to integrate the Twitter Firehose requires an internal environment to process and curate the data. We can see how Jive What Matters can act as a filter for social data. But it's no simple feat to provide thin streams of information to the right people and systems when the the data is blasting away all that is in its path.

Jive needs to quickly foster a developer community in order for its apps market to have any potential. Jive maintains its API will offer deeper integration than its competitors. But it is still a catch up period to some extent for Jive. Its apps market will be one more choice for developers.

On the other hand, Jive is standing as a leader in the social enterprise space. Its aggregation of Twitter data and an open API strategy are smart moves for a company facing deep comeptition from some of the largest technology companies in the world.