ReadWriteWeb

VMware announced today that it will acquire Socialcast, an enterprise microblogging and social network software-as-a-service. The move expands VMware's software-as-a-service portfolio, which also includes Zimbra, Mozy and SlideRocket. VMware is owned by EMC.

Last week Huddle announced an intriguing guarantee: The Huddle Adoption Guarantee. According to the company's announcement, it now guarantees 100% user adoption across the enterprise or your money back.

That's a bold promise. We've covered the troubles involved in enterprise 2.0 adoption before. And new social and collaborative technologies are not the only ones to have trouble with adoption. CRM has been notoriously problematic in the enterprise as well.

Is it time for vendors to step-up and offer adoption guarantees?

Seesmic, a third party client for Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, updated its iPhone app today. One the biggest additions is support for Salesforce.com's Chatter service. Seesmic has offered Chatter support in its desktop application since September, and beta support for Chatter is already available on Android. Seesmic also added support for in-line previewing of Instagram photos.

Salesforce.com launched its own Chatter iPhone app in September. But for individuals or teams that need support for multiple social networks, this new app could be a boon.

Moxie, an enterprise social network platform, released an iPhone app for its Moxie Employee Spaces app today.

Moxie started life as nGenera, but changed its name last year. The company invests heavily in usability research, and hopes its products will become the most user-friendly social media applications. Moxie offers both customer facing and employee facing software, and has a history of providing consulting services. Employee Spaces is its offering for internal social media.

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.

This week SAP expanded the ability of StreamWork, its enterprise 2.0 software-as-a-service, to integrate with other enterprise SAP software. StreamWork released its enterprise edition in December. Up to now its integrations have included SaaS offerings such as Box, Doodle, Evernote, Google Apps, MindMeister and Scribd. Integrating with other enterprise-class SAP software is a major step forward for StreamWork.

Enterprise social networking service Yammer today released a new version of its iOS app. The new version adds threaded discussions, private messaging and full Retina Display support. Also, users will now be able to view documents from within the app.

Gartner Research VP Mike Rollings is calling for an end to Taylorism as a management doctrine. "Humans have become cogs in business machinery pursuing efficiency," he writes. If you think that sounds radical, last year Wall Street Journal editor Allan Murray wrote a piece titled "The End of Management" decrying hierarchy, bureaucracy and encouraging business leaders to embrace change.

But Rollings and Murray are contributing nothing new. It's a rallying cry that has been heard for decades. Enterprise 2.0 and social business proponents like to talk about breaking down silos, flattening organizational structures and making work meaningful again. I know I do. But we're fooling ourselves if we think these are new ideas.

Socialtext announced today that it will release a virtual appliance that can be deployed as part of an on-premise or in the public cloud using VMware. The virtual appliance will provide all the features of the Socialtext software-as-a-service and its managed appliance.

There's mounting in interest in private, hybrid and "virtual private" clouds as companies look to take advantage of cloud elasticity without relinquishing too much control of mission critical systems. Socialtext cites Gartner researching finding that "76 percent of IT departments are planning to invest in private cloud strategies by 2012."

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."