Yammer, Jive, Microsoft Sharepoint are ‘blank pieces of paper,’ says Zeppelin

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — What if you could have all of your employees, cloud applications, documents, files, and customer data in one place? Sounds impossible, as the cloud is split up between a bunch of different applications and companies, but Zeppelin (yes, its URL really does have 3 p’s) thinks it can actually capture them all in a jar.

“Tools like Yammer, Jive, SharePoint, all those tools that are promising to be the next Facebook or Twitter for your business… once they’re installed inside a company, they just sit there empty,” said co-founder Anze Vodovnik at the DEMO Conference today. “It’s like a blank piece of paper. Very powerful, but underused.”

Zeppelin lets employees put quick blurbs about their day in front of coworkers. It connects with Google Analytics, Basecamp, Microsoft, and customer relationship management systems, and allows employees to upload files and photos. You can also sign up for a daily or weekly summary of what is happening on your team.

The company launched its private beta today. Right now, Zeppelin is only going after the small to medium-sized business market.

“I wonder about outside of Silicon Valley, do people really care about GitHub … being integrated into their collaboration suite?” said Ross Fubini, investor with Kapor Capital, in a panel discussion after Zeppelin’s presentation.

The competitors are real as well: Zeppelin is also up against customer relationship manager Salesforce and its Yammer competitor Chatter. Yammer considers itself the business social network and acts a lot like the Facebook newsfeed. Employees can contribute quick updates in a Yammer stream as well as upload photos, files and add links. It is possible to hook up Google documents, and the company recently bought OneDrum to integrate Microsoft Office to your Yammer groups.