Box.net Offers Proof of Its New Enterprise Strategy

Box.net announced today that it has integrated its cloud-based document storage and sharing solution with Salesforce.com. Current Box.net customers that want to integrate with Salesforce CRM can contact Box.net directly to activate the service. Salesforce.com customers may now download Box.net from the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

Box.net services will now be available in the Lead, Account, Contact, and Opportunity tabs of Salesforce CRM. In addition, the Box.net native interface and full range of services will be accessible via a dedicted tab on the Salesforce CRM interface. Users can upload new files to Box.net, edit existing files, digitally sign electronic documents, and e-mail or e-fax files. Large enterprise users will be given unlimited Box.net storage. The Box.net video embedded below briefly demonstrates the new Salesforce CRM integration.

While Box.net started as a consumer focused business, today’s announcement marks the first tangible manifestation of its emerging enterprise strategy. Box.net intends to be a cloud-based  document repository that can be accessed through a broad range of enterprise applications.

The content-as-a-service model envisioned by Box.net will gain traction in the coming months. I believe that a centralized content repository, located on-premise or in the cloud, is a key piece of any enterprise’s infrastructure. Moreover, content services — functionality that enables users to create, store, edit, and share content — should be accessible from any enterprise application, including composite applications such as portals or mashups created for specific roles (e.g. sales and/or marketing employees, channel partners, customers). Users should not be required to interact with content only through dedicated tools such as office productivity suites and Content Management Systems (CMS).

Other content authoring and CMS software vendors are beginning to consider, understand, and (in some cases) embrace this deployment model. Box.net is one of the first proprietary software vendors to instantiate it. Adoption statistics of their new Salesforce CRM integration should eventually provide a good reading as to whether or not enterprise customers are also ready to embrace the content-as-a-service model.

Integration of Social Software and Content Management Systems: The Big Picture

Jive Software’s announcement last week of the Jive SharePoint Connector was met with a “so what” reaction by many people. They criticized Jive for not waiting to make the announcement until the SharePoint Connector is actually available later this quarter (even though pre-announcing product is now a fairly common practice in the industry.) Many also viewed this as a late effort by Jive to match existing SharePoint content connectivity found in competitor’s offerings, most notably those of NewsGator, Telligent, Tomoye, Atlassian, Socialtext, and Connectbeam.

Those critics missed the historical context of Jive’s announcement and, therefore, failed to understand its ramifications. Jive’s SharePoint integration announcement is very important because it:

• underscores the dominance of SharePoint in the marketplace, in terms of deployments as a central content store, forcing all competitors to acknowledge that fact and play nice (provide integration)
• reinforces the commonly-held opinion that SharePoint’s current social and collaboration tools are too difficult and expensive to deploy, causing organizations to layer third-party solution on top of existing SharePoint deployments
• is the first of several planned connections from Jive Social Business Software (SBS) to third-party content management systems, meaning that SBS users will eventually be able to find and interact with enterprise content without regard for where it is stored
• signals Jive’s desire to become the de facto user interface for all knowledge workers in organizations using SBS

The last point is the most important. Jive’s ambition is bigger than just out-selling other social software vendors. The company intends to compete with other enterprise software vendors, particularly with platform players (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP), to be the primary productivity system choice of large organizations. Jive wants to position SBS as the knowledge workers’ desktop, and their ability to integrate bi-directionally with third-party enterprise applications will be key to attaining that goal.

Jive’s corporate strategy was revealed in March, when they decreed a new category of enterprise software — Social Business Software. Last week’s announcement of an ECM connector strategy reaffirms that Jive will not be satisfied by merely increasing its Social Media or Enterprise 2.0 software market share. Instead, Jive will seek to dominate its own category that bleeds customers from other enterprise software market spaces.

Jive Talkin’

As you may already know, Jive Software made a bold move yesterday.  The company simultaneously created a new category in the enterprise software market and rebranded their flagship product.  Details of the announcement may be found in the Jive press release and in the following video.

more about "What if Work Was Social Again? on Vimeo", posted with vodpod

Jive and its Clearspace enterprise collaboration product have been recognized by several influential industry analysts as leaders and visionaries in what is commonly referred to as the Social Media software category.  Jive’s repositioning underscores their commitment to leading the emerging market for business collaboration software that employs Web 2.0 philosophy and functionality.  The repositioning also implicitly reaffirms the view that this software segment has become muddled by undifferentiated marketing messages from the ever increasing number of vendors trying to stake a claim in the space.

I have never particularly liked the “Social Media” label.  Perhaps it is a sign of my age, but “media” still carries a strong connotation of information (or entertainment) generated by someone else and pushed at me.  Surely others view media as something they can create themselves and release to the Web (or an intranet) where it can be discovered by others.  However, those people are the minority, as the technographic data gathered by Forrester Research clearly shows.  Most workers are passive consumers of information, not true collaborators in the process of creating and sharing it.

The Social Media label is also very restrictive.  It applies well to the Marketing function’s Business-to-Consumer applications of Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) software, but doesn’t adequately describe intra-business or Business-to-Business use.  While Jive’s new category label — Social Business Software — may not be the best possible phrase, it creates a bigger tent under which all types of business collaboration can be included.  The label also aims to dispel the notion that the use of social software by employees is a time-wasting activity by putting equal emphasis on “social” and “business”.

I applaud Jive Software’s attempt to broaden the market for E2.0 software by creating a new category.  This action should be a catalyst for not only their growth, but for the entire market’s as well.  The new category ultimately may not be seen as the game changing disrupter that Jive’s Chief Market Officer, Sam Lawrence, declares it to be on his blog.  However, the potential is there for Social Business Software to be the next dominant category of enterprise software, following in the footsteps of ERP and CRM.  It will be interesting to watch the results of Jive’s attempt to differentiate itself and broaden the playing field for its flagship product.

What do you think about Jive’s new category label and its potential to disrupt the market for enterprise software?