Jive is a business VoIP provider that was launched in 2006. Jive is headquartered in Orem, Utah, and they provide VoIP service throughout the United States. Jive is a young company, but they have grown a lot since their founding in 2006. In 2009, Jive took a spot in the “Top 25 Under 5” Award at the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum.

Jive Communications specifically sells business VoIP, but they serve a wide variety of businesses. Jive’s major clients are:
Small businesses
Enterprises
Public sector groups
VoIP resellers
Jive uses a cloud platform called Jive Core to provide hosted VoIP service to companies of all sizes. Cloud technologies removes some of the limitations of telecom service, which means that Jive can provide seamless VoIP service to very large businesses.

A cloud platform like the Jive Core is an Internet-based system. This means that all of the hosted services provided to you by Jive while be managed and maintained through their central computer system and delivered to you through a cloud connection.

Jive is at the forefront of many developments in VoIP technology. They were among the very first to use a cloud platform to provide VoIP service.

In an interview with Silicon Slopes, CEO and Founder Brent Thomson says that the reason for VoIP’s success is this unique approach to VoIP technology. According to Thomson, many VoIP service providers have failed to thoroughly distinguish VoIP from traditional telephone service. In fact, he says, a lot of VoIP providers still use the same basic hardware as the telephone companies.This has caused a lot of other VoIP providers to fall behind the times in terms of VoIP service.

Thomson, who made his break into the entrepreneurial world with a software engineering firm called Agile Studios, says that Jive takes a different approach to VoIP by handling it as a piece of software, rather than as just an alternative telecom service.

As a result, Jive Communications has been able to eliminate a lot of the outdated technology that led to the failure of several major VoIP providers. In fact, right around the time that Jive was founded, several large VoIP companies went under. This allowed Jive to rise up as a newcomer with new ideas.

In the same interview with Silicon Slopes, Thomson says that he was in part attracted to developing VoIP because of his own struggles as a business owner with trying to find a good phone service. When he owned Agile Studios, he found that it would have been very expensive to add some new phones when he hired some new employees. So, the precursor to the Jive Core was tested first in Thomson’s own office.

While Jive’s primary focus is hosted VoIP, they also sell a number of other items and services. Their products can be categorized as follows :

• Hosted VoIP
• Hosted PBX
• Broadband Service
• Hosted Video (for enterprises only)
• Hosted Email (for enterprises only)
• Managed Firewall (for public sector groups)
• Hosted VoIP Phones (for VoIP resellers)

Some of these services are only marketed toward certain clients. For example, hosted video and hosted email are targeted towards enterprises, and not towards small businesses.

Hosted VoIP is a VoIP service provided to you from a remote location. In this case, your hosted VoIP with Jive is hosted through a cloud platform

A company uses a PBX (public branch exchange) to route calls within an office and control traffic with incoming and outgoing calls.

With Jive, your hosted PBX is actually a virtual PBX. As Jive defines it, a virtual PBX is simply a hosted PBX that doesn’t have any physical components. It is hosted entirely from a virtual platform, in this case from Jive Core.

Broadband refers to the use of frequencies to transmit data for voice, sound, etc. Broadband is mostly used to access  the Internet. Jive has broadband services for DSL, DS3, T1, and Ethernet.

Hosted video gives you a video component to your VoIP calls. Video calling can greatly improve the quality of conference calls.

A hosted email service provides you with an email service for your whole business. This is especially useful if you want a particular company email address for every employee in this format: john_smith@business.org. It also allows you to easily control your office email account, add new email addresses, and send out company emails.

A managed firewall is important for keeping your network safe and secure. Jive sells managed firewalls for large enterprise Internet and VoIP systems.

Jive also sells hosted VoIP phones to their VoIP partners. These partners are usually VoIP resellers.