Duh: New Jive study shows social is pretty important in business

Business social networking company Jive published a study conducted by Penn Schoen Berland today that shows more than three-fourths of the top executives in large enterprises consider collaboration software like Yammer and Huddle a top priority.

The study also found most executives and at least half of the newest class of workers called “millennials” have downloaded an app for a smartphone or tablet that is work-related. Nearly all of those same people said the apps improved their productivity and more than half of them didn’t get permission from systems administrators before deploying them.

That means the strategy employed by a lot of enterprise startups — getting the apps in the hands of users and then forcing administrators to buy the service — is working. When enough employees start using a free version of a service like Zendesk or Yammer in a large company, administrators are inclined to purchase the full service so they can control the flow of information and prevent security leaks.

Jive — along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net — is taking a lot of the lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook and applying them to the enterprise. It’s just one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 space.

For example, Yammer, another business social network, has picked up around 2 million verified corporate users, and 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. Box.net currently has 6 million users and around 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Jive has said it has more than 15 million users.

Jive CEO Zingale took over the company earlier in 2010, first on an interim basis in February, then more permanently in May. When taking the reins full-time, Zingale told the Wall Street Journal he’s hoping Jive will file for an initial public offering sometime in 2011. He told VentureBeat in an interview back in July 2010 that an IPO was still planned for 2011.

Jive has now raised $57.5 million total. The company’s most recent round of funding closed in July last year, when the company raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.