To stay afloat in today’s rapidly changing and increasingly volatile business landscape, enterprises have come to rely on cloud services for better communication, enhanced collaboration, and more streamlined operations. Through cloud-based solutions, companies can enjoy the scalability, flexibility, mobility, and cost-saving benefits that enable them to achieve business stability and growth. But not all cloud services are created equal.
In order to deliver on the real promises of cloud computing, it is essential for enterprises to decide on the type of architecture that works best for their business. By leveraging a true cloud multi-tenant system, organizations can support hundreds (or even thousands) of mission-critical applications and scale at will to meet the ever-changing needs of customers or company growth.
SourceForge recently caught up with Jim Somers, the Vice President of Marketing / Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) for Jive by LogMeIn, to discuss cloud multi-tenancy and explain how a true multi-tenant cloud architecture optimizes business performance while mitigating risks and cutting costs. Somers also offers insights on the future of cloud communication and shares how Jive Cloud enables businesses to scale more rapidly and evenly.
Q: First and foremost, please share with us a brief overview of your company (e.g., year founded, headquarters, size, etc)?
Jim Somers, the Vice President of Marketing / UCC for Jive by LogMeIn
A: In April of 2018, LogMeIn, one of the world’s top 10 public SaaS companies completed the acquisition of Jive Communications, Inc. Jive, a Utah-based company, was founded in 2006 by a handful of software developers and entrepreneurs who didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg for a phone system and decided to build a cloud-based solution themselves. Today, the combined company now boasts over 3,500 employees in over 20 offices around the globe. We support over two million daily users, 200 million customer engagements, and five billion voice minutes per year.
Jive by LogMeIn provides cloud-based phone systems and unified communications services through the Jive cloud architecture, which offers an integrated, seamless experience that provides a richer context and creates more efficient connections between co-workers and clients. And Jive’s cloud delivery model ensures that every organization always has the latest technology, features, and applications.
Q: What types of businesses do you currently serve? What pain points do you seek to solve?
A: Our customers include high-growth businesses and public sector institutions that need a scalable platform that is more flexible and cost-effective than their existing legacy systems. We serve everyone from small, single-user startups and restaurants, to dental and law offices and large tech enterprises that have felt the pain of success and want a system that can scale effortlessly to accommodate their customer growth and improve collaboration and communication both internally and externally.
Q: “Multi-tenancy” is one of the most important features of cloud computing. But what does the term mean exactly? And how is a multi-tenant cloud different from a single-tenant cloud?
A: To put it simply, a single-tenant architecture is one where a single instance of the software (and its supporting infrastructure) serves a single customer, whereas a multi-tenant architecture is a single instance supporting multiple customers. With multi-tenancy, every customer shares the software application and database while remaining secure and separate from other tenants.
Jive Cloud is completely multi-tenant, with the exact same system running a 14,000-user enterprise municipal installation as well as a 10-user commercial SMB client. Born in the cloud, Jive Cloud provides no legacy or on-premises distractions. Unlike many UCaaS competitors, Jive has not taken an existing, single-tenant application and simply virtualized it on a server in a data center.
Q: Why should businesses employ a multi-tenant cloud architecture? In what ways can a multi-cloud strategy enable businesses to scale more rapidly and evenly?
A: The benefits of a multi-tenant architecture such as Jive includes lowering costs as companies of all sizes can share infrastructure and data center operational costs, and you don’t need to constantly update your hardware and applications.
This helps businesses scale more rapidly (unlike in a single tenant solution) as vendors do not need to build a new and unique instance for every new tenant. Why? Because in multi-tenant applications, the tenants use a common infrastructure, meaning there isn’t a need to keep building data centers for individual tenants.
At Jive, as we update our software offerings, it can be applied to all our customers at once. This way, users don’t have to worry about maintenance, updates, and tricky configurations as we — the multi-tenant vendor — can easily service customers of any size, allowing them to grow without stress.
Q: Jive Cloud is a true cloud-based platform with a future-ready architecture. What are the key capabilities and benefits of the Jive Cloud Platform?
A: Because Jive was born in the cloud and has a multi-tenant architecture, we can have the same system running a 14,000-user enterprise municipal installation and a 10-user commercial SMB client. This benefits high-growth clients, as Jive’s real-time platform scales effortlessly to accommodate customer growth.
We want our customers to succeed, and that often means never missing a call from their own customers. With Jive, you don’t have to be at your desk in the office to answer a call. With the Jive Cloud Platform, workers can communicate no matter where they are, be it in the office, on the road, at home, or on the beach. And our service and platform are more reliable than any on-premises hardware. With Jive Business Continuity, you can preserve your essential on-premises phone functions during an Internet disruption and call staff and emergency services.
And our platform makes it easy to open a new office as your business expands. Jive also provides hundreds of integrations for the software tools you need to successfully run your business. Additionally, you’ll receive the latest software updates throughout the year without lifting a finger.
Q: The Jive Cloud architecture has been purpose-built to deliver the most scalable, secure, reliable, and extensible hosted communications services. Can you tell us some sample use cases of the Jive Cloud Platform?
A: The Jive Cloud Platform was designed with high-growth businesses and public sector institutions in mind. The solution is purpose-built to serve those organizations needing a scalable platform that is incredibly flexible and cost-effective, providing clients with an integrated, seamless experience with richer context and connections. Regardless of your department or industry, you’ll always have the latest technology, features, and applications by using Jive.
In fact, according to the Federal E-Rate program database, Jive is the leading provider of hosted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to the K–12 industry. School districts choose Jive more often because of customized features like Jive Safety Suite, integration with overhead paging, district management tools, and remote alert and lockdown. And those within the healthcare and legal industries (among others) love Jive for its ease of use, including simple configuration and web management, as well as cost savings and the ability to create custom schedules, effectively handle inbound communications to create a great patient and caller experience, and stay connected to the office regardless of your location with our mobile app.
Q: What makes Jive Cloud a stand out from other cloud-based solutions in the market?
A: Jive has some of the largest cloud voice customers ever installed, including existing customers with over 10,000 users on their system. Jive also has built world-class sales engineering, field engineering, project management, and professional account management teams to support its enterprise clients.
Because of this, Jive is the best-reviewed and highest-rated B2B VoIP company. According to independent review sites including G2Crowd, Consumer Affairs, VoIPReview, Google, GetVoIP and others, Jive is one of the highest-rated B2B VoIP companies in the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) industry. Jive’s customer-first mindset has led to exceptionally high NPS scores and churn rates well below industry averages.
Jive also has a distributed cloud architecture, unlike the majority of UCaaS providers (both public and private). This allows for better redundancy, availability, and scale.
Q: Looking into the future, what market trends, technologies, and/or strategies are bound to shape the cloud computing industry, and how is Jive meeting these?
A: There’s so much innovation happening in cloud computing and the UCaaS market right now. I believe we’ll continue to see the rise and adoption of hybrid solutions, intelligent networks, new unified communications solutions such as the internet of things (IoT), information technologies (IT), social, and vertical and contact center, mobile solutions support, and the continued integration of UCaaS with office productivity software. We also believe that video will continue to climb in importance in the UCaaS space — especially with the growing remote workforce.
About Jive Communications
Jive Communications is a leading and trusted provider of innovative cloud-based phone systems and unified communications (UC) solutions. Recently acquired by LogMeIn, Jive Communications continues to deliver reliable and enterprise-grade solutions to make business communication easy and accessible. Headquartered in Utah, Jive Communications specializes in contact center, hosted VoIP, video conferencing solution, mobile applications, unified communications, and more.