ReadWriteEnterprise

If you are in the market for an enterprise social networking tool and haven't yet considered Yammer or Jive or Socialtext or the dozens of other competitors out there, there is a new version 3.0 of Neudesic Pulse that might be worthy for you. It will be announced next week at the Microsoft Convergence conference, and the reason is clear: they offer the best integration with a variety of Microsoft services to their social streams. (We noted that Yammer had SharePoint integration for more than two years here.)

Both Podio and Mzinga have announced major updates to their enterprise collaboration and social streaming services this week. While they operate at different price points, this is yet another indication of product maturity in this space.

First is Podio, whom we included as one of our 2011 startups to watch from last December. New this week is what they call Employee Network where everyone from the same company will automatically be joined, and only those with a verified domain email address can get access. This gets around the startup effort to promulgate Podio across the company. They also made changes to their pricing model too.

We all know that apps are getting more social, but various announcements this week emphasize the point for enterprise purposes. These include connecting LinkedIn, mailing list software Lyris and Jive with other applications that can increase their reach and make connections easier.

With more than 100 vendors offering integrated discussion forum/wiki/news feed apps, Gartner has produced its report of this marketplace, calling it Social CRM. "Most vendors remain relatively small and unprofitable," says the report authored by Adam Sarner and others called Magic Quadrant for Social CRM. (You can't really look at the report unless you are a Gartner customer, though.)

You probably don't know that IBM sells a social media and community building tool that competes with Socialtext and Jive and combines wikis, social streams, discussion forums and integrates with IBM's Sametime for presence/IM communications. It is called Connections and today IBM announced that mobile versions of Connections are free to download. This is a good thing, because their pricing was driving me batty. The software that has more options than your father's Oldsmobile, and trying to find the right place to learn about it on IBM's Web site isn't easy either. (Try starting here.)

Jive Software, the company that has been one of the leaders in collaboration software, has acquired OffiSync, the company that makes social media add-ons to Microsoft Outlook. You gotta love a company that starts out its corporate overview by saying "old business processes and technologies suck" right on its website.

Today Jive Software announced its acquisition of Proximal Labs, a social network analytics company. Prior to the acquisition, Jive was a customer of Proximal Labs. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Proximal Labs co-founder and CEO David Gutelius is joining Jive as Chief Social Scientist.

Jive will use Proximal's machine learning technology, powered by Apache Hadoop, to help its users apply complex analytics to their enterprise social graphs. Example use cases include locating subject matter experts both inside and outside the firewall or surfacing relevant content within the network. The company is calling the platform "Jive What Matters."

Jive and Salesforce.com have been seen as competitors since at least the announcement of Chatter, which brought Salesforce.com into the enterprise 2.0 market. Jive has also started to encroach on Salesforce.com territory by announcing its Jive Apps Market, a competitor to the Salesforce.com AppExchange and Force.com platform.

But now, Appirio is making the two vendors' services work in harmony.

"Yammer and Salesforce Chatter are gonna have some significant new competition starting Monday," Robert Scoble tweeted over the weekend. It turns out he was talking about Convofy, a new product from the Adobe and LMKR funded startup Scrybe.

In response to Scoble, Spigit VP of Product Hutch Carpenter tweeted: "Given incumbents, better have some 9x secret sauce or be a big vendor." I couldn't have said it better myself.

Well, Scrybe isn't a big vendor. So does it have some secret sauce?

As part of its Predicts 2011 series, Gartner has made four predictions for the near future of business intelligence and analytics. Also, Forrester analyst James Kobielus has written a lengthy article outlining his own predictions for business analytics in Information Week. Both see analytics being embedded in more business processes, particularly in collaborative and social software.