Jive, SAP partner on 'social BI'

SAP and enterprise social-networking vendor Jive said Tuesday they have formed an agreement that will see SAP's BusinessObjects BI OnDemand software integrated with Jive's community and collaboration platform.

The companies made the announcement at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.

Jive's roughly 3,000 customers, many of which are large enterprises, "are looking to visualize and understand how social software is driving the bottom line," said Christopher Morace, senior vice president of products.

In a demonstration, the vendors showed how an administrator could use the BI capabilities for broad analyses, such as how many users are posting content to a company's community site.

The software could be used in a variety of other scenarios as well. For example, a user looking at a data set pulled from a company CRM (customer relationship management) system could share it with others by adding a widget to a blog post. Or a sales manager could use the tools to analyze the interactions between employees who worked on successful deals, as well as ones the company lost.

In general, the tools will help companies provide rank-and-file business users with analytic capabilities, Morace said. "Right now, most people can't even get their hands on the data."

Pricing for the BI capabilities hasn't been finalized, Morace said.

The announcement was just one in a number made by vendors Tuesday in conjunction with the conference, which runs through Thursday. Among the releases:

-- Socialtext rolled out a version of its collaboration platform that is available at no charge for up to 50 users. It includes dashboards, wikis, Twitter-style messaging and other functions. The company also announced the public beta of SocialCalc, a spreadsheet aimed at distributed teams. Its development is being led by Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the seminal VisiCalc spreadsheet.

-- Bluenog announced the 4.5 version of its ICE platform, which pulls together a variety of open-source components into a unified portal, content management and BI system. The new release features wikis, group calendaring and improved central administration.

-- Content management vendor Open Text announced that a social media module to its suite will be available in July. The new capabilities include personal dashboards, wikis, blogs, profiles and communities, as well as iPhone and BlackBerry support.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.