Mother Ships, the App World and a Sense of What's to Come

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.

How platforms

This past week's news illustrates how platforms and app marketplaces are integrating with software and services providers. Companies just 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 like as not most of all, preparing us for the then generation of data driven applications.

Appirio is a cloud solutions provider. it is acting as a third-party connector. As we reported this week, Appirio announced this week that it now has the capability to integrate critical business information from Salesforce CRM with the collaboration capabilities of Jive Social Business Software. At the core are services that allow for sales teams to collaborate on sales opportunities. The collaborative sales app is available to Jive 5 beta clients and will be available in the Jive Apps Market upon availability of Jive 5.

Jive Software and Alfresco Software announced a partnership this week that furthermore shows how the two companies are integrating social collaboration and content management technologies with the CMIS framework. The alliance allows for the content management repository capabilities from Alfresco to work within the Jive framework. The integration is important for larger companies that require content management features nevertheless also see the increasing need for collaboration technologies in order for their businesses to be competitive.

CMIS makes it possible to connect enterprise content management systens with collaboration technologies. That positions Jive to address the solutions needs of large enterprise clients that face the reality that social technologies have to be integrated into content management systems. With Salesforce integrations, we are seeing the emergence of large interdependent systems that makes rivals more like competitive business partners.

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