for W3c validation

Photo: Jakkii Musgrave

Recently, the team from Ripple Effect Group attended Aurea’s inaugural Aurea Experience conferences in both Munich and New Orleans.

In Munich, the conference was held on November 11-12 at the beautiful Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Kempinski, and on 4-5 December Aurea Experience hit the French Quarter in New Orleans. Nearly 500 customers, partners and prospects spent time learning and sharing together around Jive as a product and as a critical business tool helping organisations solve real business problems. Other Aurea products and clients were also present in Munich. It was valuable to meet other clients using products like the CRM and get an understanding of the Aurea suite of software.

Photo: Anne Bartlett-Bragg

We heard from customers like Lloyds Banking Group, Vodafone Ukraine, Schaeffler, International Committee of the Red Cross, and Carlson Wagonlit Travel in Munich, and from American Airlines, Morgan Stanley, VEON (presented by ANROM), CommVault, Thomson Reuters and Royal Bank of Canada in New Orleans. Jakkii spoke in the Digital Workplace track on the importance of shifting mindsets from ‘me’ to ‘we’ to support change and transformation with community, and we heard interesting keynotes like Bruce Daisley of Twitter on ‘Fall in Love With Work All Over Again’ and Ben Casnocha of Allied Talent on ‘The Start-Up of You: Transform Your Work and Career with Entrepreneurial Thinking’.

Of course, we also heard about Jive as a product during the keynote from Scott Brighton (CEO) and long-time Jivers Joey Levi & Derek DeMoro, as well as a deeper dive session with Shai Sagi. The central theme from Aurea’s presentations and their stated direction for Jive is in improving relationships in context. By putting people back at the centre, they will be able to build contextual experiences for each person, whether that’s with content, activity, or their connections (relationships).

While graph technology (or graph databases) aren’t new – and Jive isn’t the only digital workplace product looking to realise the potential of them inside the workplace –  Aurea has partnered with Amazon Neptune to power how Jive will differ through relationships focused on people and content in a context. Analysts like Alan Lepofsky have long considered context to be the missing piece in the digital workplace, so it will be compelling to see how Jive and PeopleGraph can help shift us towards a more contextual future.

A few other details from Aurea’s presentations worth reviewing are outlined below.

Aurea

Photo: Helen Ferguson

Aurea is a young company (2012) and fast growing through an aggressive acquisition program. Looking back at 2012 and comparing it to today, Aurea’s revenue has grown from $30m to $500m, their customer base has increased from 250 to 4,000, and their product suite has expanded from 4 to 35, including their largest acquisition, Jive, in 2017. Aurea Prime (renamed Aurea Unlimited) rolled out in 2018 and already 25% of customers have taken advantage of it. More information about Aurea Unlimited will be released in early 2019.

Aurea talked more at Aurea Experience about why they acquired Jive. As a product, Jive has great appeal with customers who are market leaders. It impacts how work gets done and it has great potential in the collaboration and innovation space. In Scott Brighton’s keynote, he discussed that on average, 70% of the workforce works remotely more than once a week, and within 10 years 50% will be part of the freelance workforce. Content is growing exponentially with 90% of all web content created in the past 2 years. Jive is a good fit to meet the needs of a rapidly changing workforce and because of this, Aurea is investing heavily in the best technology and innovations to take Jive to the next level.

Over the past 12 months, Aurea has migrated 500 customers to AWS, delivered 14 product releases delivering fixes to hundreds of issues and performance improvements. April 2019 is the targeted completion month for all remaining AWS migrations. Up until now, the advancements made have not been all that obvious to Jive users but in 2019 customers will start to see the rollout of new features and improvements. Shai Sagi presented a high-level overview of what’s to come.

Roadmap

Photo: Anne Bartlett-Bragg

During the product keynote and the deep-dive session, Aurea spoke about the need to address digital crowding and using Jive to filter the signal from the noise, which will be achieved with the introduction of PeopleGraph (more on this below). While working to deliver PeopleGraph, they will continue to deliver performance and quality improvements, including:

• urgent notifications
• video improvements including automatic transcription
• a revamped Jive Daily app
• improved relevance in search results
• tile enhancements and performance improvements

They are also looking at time decay and removing the need to archive outdated content. These are just some of the plans Aurea has for Jive and we are looking forward to receiving more detail on these features to share with you over the coming months.

PeopleGraph

Photo: Jakkii Musgrave

In both Munich and New Orleans, the product keynote focused on PeopleGraph, which is Aurea’s solution to digital crowding and putting ‘people’ back at the centre of the digital workplace. They talked about being reinspired by graph-based consumer networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, but taking the idea of connections or friends further than that, and adding context. Aurea believes PeopleGraph will allow them to drive Jive to deliver more value to organisations, particularly through deeper employee engagement.

PeopleGraph will be built on the Amazon Neptune framework, and will form the basis of some planned Jive features, such as contextual recommendations, semantic intent-based search, intelligent news fees, and what Aurea describe as a “reimagined digital diary.” It will also enable organisations to generate a map of relationships within the organisation through algorithmic analysis of the data within the graph.

You can also read more on AureaWorks (you don’t need to be signed in).

Photo: Anne Bartlett-Bragg

Aurea managed to pack a lot into 1.5 days at each event, leaving us with lots to reflect upon. We all enjoyed the opportunity to connect with some of our clients who travelled to the conferences, as well as with Aurea team members and other customers and partners. We had a great time enjoying some sights in Munich and New Orleans with our fellow attendees while we were there, and valuable conversations and insights were shared with many. We’re excited about what’s to come with Jive and are looking forward to a great 2019 with a renewed focus at Aurea on putting people at the centre of the digital workplace.

We’ll see you at our next Jive User Group in early 2019 – stay tuned for dates!