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Cisco announced today that collaboration tools vendor Versly.com is now part of its ever-growing family. Versly hasn't yet had a real product, but you can apply for a chance to be in its closed beta on their site.

Versly's ten employees will be integrated into Cisco Collaboration Software Group that also includes its WebEx, Jabber and Quad product lines. It will be offered as a separate service, but Cisco will eventually integrate its features into these three existing services designed for enterprise customers, perhaps as early as 2012. So comment streams, detecting whether someone is actually inside a document at any given moment, and jointly editing documents will all be parts of Cisco's collaboration tools eventually.

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.

The integration of software and services companies is starting to show how the social business market is consolidating into a network of companies that are like big mother ships that provide a platform for smaller service providers to operate within its frameworks.

Companies such as Jive Software and Salesforce.com are acting as networks with multiple feeders that connect large software providers with service oriented networks. In turn, developers are building apps that integrate with these networks, fueling the drive for more collaboration and perhaps most of all, preparing us for the next generation of data driven applications.

Jive Software is adding four new members to its board of directors, including one of Mark Zuckerberg's direct reports responsible for technical operations at Facebook; the current president of McAfee Software and the Google technologist responsible for the development of Google Chrome and HTML 5 initiatives.

The move is part of what appearts to be Jive's efforts to prepare for an Initial Public Offering. It shows investors that the company has the clout to achieve a level of strength that positions it to compete even more with its chief target: Microsoft.

"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?

I find Jive Software to be a bit of a paradox. . I like the people and the company they've built. They're a local success story here in Portland. They have transformed from a client-technology, software forum provider into a collaboration leader.

They seem to be moving in the right direction. The company is headed for an IPO. So, what's the paradox?

Last night, Jive Software released its Jive Apps SDK to developers. For Jive, this isn't just an SDK release: it's the beginning of a new direction. Jive assigned twice as many developers to building its application platform and Jive Apps Market as it did to developing the previous release of Jive. And that's an indication not just of where Jive is going as a company, but where the enterprise software market seems to be headed. Salesforce.com made it clear last week that it is now a platform company vendor first and a SaaS company second. Companies such as Jive, Salesforce.com and Google are not just trying to copy the success of app stores in the consumer market, but create a whole new paradigm for enterprise software.

This year enterprise 2.0 went from being a fringe idea to being mainstream as CIOs started asking "how?" instead of "why?" Big name vendors entered the marketplace with new products and existing vendors released new versions with innovative new features.

We chose to break up the enterprise products of the year up into categories: new product, e-mail, mobile, development tool, database, social software suite, social CRM, microblogging, conferencing and CMS. Products were evaluated based on market performance, innovation, utility, impact on the space as a whole and improvement over last year. Each of these products either changed the game, or won it.

Jive Software made three announcements at JiveWorld today: 1) Over 50 developers have committed to developing applications for the forthcoming Jive Apps Market. 2) The release of Jive Social Media Engagement 4.5 3) The release of Jive Mobile 4.5. The products - along with Jive's flagship SBS product - work together to combat what Jive staff call the Social Frankenstein - the monster enterprises end up with when they try to stitch togethers disparate wikis, blogs, external social networking accounts, and other tools.

In preparation for what looks like an IPO, Jive Software announced yesterday it had raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It's a funding story of relative significance that documents one company's rise to prominence and a venture capital firm's growing commitment to the social enterprise and cloud computing space.

The Jive investment is the second major funding that we have seen in the past several days. Last week, Atlassian raised $60 million from Accel Partners.

That adds up to nearly $100 million in funding for the social enterprise space in just the past week.