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.”
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In a statement that sounds consistent with consensus views about where the Web is going, Brian Roddy, senior vice president of engineering at Jive, said “The future of work is personalized. Relevant information should find you, proactively, to improve collaboration and enable faster decision making.”
Gutelius founded Proximal after working at SRI on the DARPA-funded Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program. Two companies were spun-out of the PAL program: SIRI, which as acquired by Apple, and TrapIt, which we covered here. Gutelius wasn’t involved in either spin-off.
Jive isn’t the only company baking analytics into its social platform. Socialcast has integrated an analytics system for connecting users and surfacing relevant content, and IBM’s Lotus Connections 3.0 has analytics baked in. Other companies are expected to bring analytics to the fore, including Salesforce.com, which is already using analytics to provide bonuses to the most active users of its internal Chatter deployment.
Disclosure: IBM is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.
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