HiveLive launches enterprise community platform

HiveLive has joined the growing number of companies focused on delivering social software, or a community platform with wikis, blogs, and forums, to enterprises. HiveLive calls itself as “the first community platform to seamlessly integrate social networks with information networks.” It's not clear what the phrase means, but the foundation of the hosted service is a Hive, which integrates people, information, and permissions.

HiveLive takes a different approach than most products in the social software space, which have pre-set templates for wikis, blogs, and forums. HiveLive users can assemble collaborative applications with a simple, Web-based interface.

"Community is what's next in CRM," said HiveLive CEO John Kembel. Company sponsored online communities can help with lead generation, loyalty, retention, market intelligence and customer support in a non-standard social way, by word of mouth, participation in a community, crowd sourcing ideas and peer-to-peer support, he explained.

The company is introducing its product at the Defrag conference in Denver today.

See also: GigaOm