Jive Software has been on the move recently, with the release of Jive SBS 4.0, acquisition of social media monitoring company Filtrbox, release of Jive Market Engagement, announcement of Tony Zingale as the company’s new CEO, and relocation of headquarters to Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. An article in the Wall Street Journal last month noted that the company is aiming for a $100 million revenue run rate by year’s end in preparation for a possible IPO in 2011. Matt Tucker, Co-Founder and CTO, says Jive’s goal is to become “the next great enterprise software company.”

This week, Jive continues its momentum by unveiling a product strategy designed to help companies better engage with customers, employees, and third party platforms already in use for billing, content management, CRM, and other key enterprise functions. The strategy includes the following product announcements:

Jive What Matters
A new interface for consuming information and taking action on it, What Matters uses a recommendation engine called Jive Genius to learn what topics are most relevant to a person, and displays a stream of relevant activity via an interface the company calls NowView. Preferences you set up, combined with behaviors such as the pages and spaces you most frequently use, guide what you see in the stream.

What Matters is intended to reduce the noise currently present in very large Jive implementations in large organizations, and help individual employees focus on processes that need their attention, like reviewing a draft press release or approving an expense report.

Apps Market
Jive is allowing customers to create apps that allow people to get specific parts of their workflow done by connecting the core Jive platform with email, SharePoint, OpenSocial, SAP tools, CRM, PowerPoint, and other key business tools. For example, the company has formed strategic partnerships with Google and Twitter to make Jive available on the Google Apps Marketplace and from within Google Apps, and to give customers the ability to integrate the entire Twitter stream into their Jive deployments so that they can track and respond to conversations from within the Jive interface.

Jive believes that the apps marketplace could even turn IT departments into a revenue-generating units if they create great apps that are popular in the marketplace. That’s certainly an optimistic view for a part of the corporate world that’s been unfairly called increasingly irrelevant in the past few years.

What does it all mean?
This is coming at a good time. The economy is beginning to be on the upswing again, and businesses are signaling that they are ready to grow. With the iPad, Apple has signaled the beginning of a transition in the devices we use for productivity, and it’s good to see Jive making solid progress on the software apps knowledge workers use to make the most of their work day. The consumer market has shown that there is significant demand for great devices and platforms, and the same is true for business.

The only downside: There’s no Jive iPad app yet, but the company says to watch for some big announcements at JiveWorld in September.