Jive is apparently up for sale, but no one seems interested
Arik Hessendahl reports that Jive — the troubled work management software company — has been working to structure a sale of the company for several months. His sources say that Qatalyst Partners — Frank Quattrone’s firm — has been hired to shop the deal.
Recently, the company posted lower than expected numbers on February 11 2014 and lowered its guidance on the out quarters for 2014 (see Jive posts $146M in 2013 sales, with losses of $75M), and its stock fell 19% the next day.
No one is talking: Jive’s Amanda Pires is mum.
Hessendahl oddly talks about Yammer in the past tense, and never mentions IBM as a competitor:
Jive debuted in a late 2011 IPO that raised more than $160 million. It’s one of several companies that has sought to sell collaboration software for businesses that took its cues from consumer social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Its biggest rival was Yammer, which Microsoft acquired in 2012 for $1.2 billion.
Other companies in the space include Socialcast, which VMware acquired in 2011. Salesforce.com launched its own social collaboration service known as Chatter in 2010. A fifth player is Moxie Software, which has venture capital funding from Hummer Winblad and Foundation Capital, among others.
The reality is somewhat more nuanced than his claim that ‘customers aren’t as interested in social software for the enterprise as it seemed a few years ago’. There may be a commoditization of horizontal solutions like Jive, but narrow and deep solutions — such as Yammer’s integration into Microsoft’s enterprise products like Office 365 and Sharepoint, and Atlassian’s integration into developers tools like GitHub and Hipchat– are still going strong. Narrower functional social tools for HR and marketing teams are also growing in use.
My sense is that Jive never turned the corner on being the best for some well-defined group of workers doing a tightly defined sort of work. However, if they are acquired by a leader in some more narrow domain, perhaps that can still happen.
Meanwhile, my prediction that Eliza Steel would become CEO is starting to look less likely (see Elisa Steele assumes new role as Jive’s EVP of Strategy and CMO).
