Jive Software has begun talks with Salesforce.com to bring its forthcoming Clearspace enterprise collaboration suite to AppExchange, CEO Dave Hersh said. “We met with them two days ago,” Hersh told InfoWorld on Thursday. “That’s next for us.” He said Jive was also open to a SaaS partner for Clearspace, initially to be an on-premises solution. If Jive and Salesforce identified shared customers, they might strike a further SaaS relationship, he said.Clearspace, which melds wikis, blogs, document sharing, and forums under one enterprise-class architecture, was on track for general release by the end of February, Hersh said. However, before AppExchange and SaaS comes Jive’s plans to integrate its Wildfire real-time collaboration system with Clearspace the first quarter of 2007. “[Wildfire] has lots of traction” with mainly SMB users. At about the same time, Jive will make Clearspace an external, or public, collaboration system, which would then open doors to it becoming ready for CRM, Hersh said.Clearspace had “all the next-gen tools that people need” to fill the gap between Microsoft’s Sharepoint and the one-off Web 2.0 players, Hersh said. “With 90 percent of collaboration people do, we’ll cover them.” Jive, which survived the dot-com bust, “had been through the wringer” and now had the stripes that the growing number of Web 2.0 players did not, Hersh said.Clearspace was designed over a year with its key Forums customers, leading to a user-centric, tagging-based user interface, he said. Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business