Jive buys Proximal Labs for social-analytics skills

Jive Software, makers of business software with a focus on social business intelligence, has agreed to purchase Proximal Labs for an undisclosed sum.

Jive hopes that the deal will allow it to expand its portfolio to include more detailed social data analytics features, such as providing deeper insights into the relationships and interactions between organisations' employees, customers and partners.

"Proximal will help accelerate Jive's efforts to use the power of 'big data' to unlock the value of the social graph in the enterprise," Jive said in a statement on Wednesday.

The purchase will help Jive to analyse very large social data sets from internal or external sources, the company said.

"Proximal's team brings to Jive both scientific grounding in social network analysis and experience building big data systems at production scale," Brian Roddy, senior vice president of engineering at Jive, said in a blog post on Wednesday.

"At the core of Proximal's capabilities is deep expertise in information retrieval, social analytics, and machine learning, with the end goals of making content more relevant and communities more engaging."

Proximal's technology will immediately be implemented to extend the functionality of Jive's recommender, analytics, search and the Jive Social Media Engagement product, Roddy added.

The Proximal Labs team will join Jive's engineering group based in Palo Alto, California. David Gutelius, Proximal Labs co-founder and chief executive, will take a new role as chief social scientist at Jive.