Jive Software acquires OffiSync, whose plug-in integrates with Jive's social-business software to let Microsoft Office and SharePoint users collaborate within their documents.
Jive
Software is ramping up its acquisition pace with the
acquisition of OffiSync, a software-integration tool
that lets users search and annotate documents.
Financial
terms of the deal, which comes 6 weeks after Jive
acquired big data company Proximal Labs, were not
disclosed.
Jive and
OffiSync together will interact with Microsoft Office and SharePoint software,
both of which have been criticized for not being social enough at a time when
social collaboration is
headed toward becoming a $1 billion market.
Specifically,
OffiSync integration with the Jive Social Business platform will let users
create content in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SharePoint, and share and
annotate it without leaving their Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) environment to revise
it.
OffiSync will
let users push conversations into a social discussion on the Jive platform.
Users can also view and reply to discussions on the Jive platform from their
Microsoft Outlook inbox.
Jive and
OffiSync will also help supplement the contact information in Microsoft Outlook
with profiles and activities from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Jive CEO Tony Zingale and OffiSync CEO Oudi Antebi discuss the deal in this
video.
Thanks to an
existing partnership with OffiSync, Jive integration with Microsoft Office is
available immediately with Jive 4.5 and Jive 5. Integration with Microsoft
Outlook will follow in the third quarter of this year.
The OffiSync
team, most of whom are based in Tel Aviv, Israel, will join Jive but remain in
their country thanks to a new R&D center Jive is building in Tel Aviv. The
team in Israel will be led by OffiSync co-founder and CTO Roy Antebi, who will
join Jive as vice president of engineering.
Roy's brother, Oudi Antebi, will join Jive at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., as
senior vice president of enterprise solutions, driving Jive's "vision and
strategy for integration with Microsoft and the broader enterprise stack."
This makes
sense. Oudi Antebi ran marketing campaigns for Microsoft Office and SharePoint,
while Roy Antebi once shepherded a development team in the Microsoft SQL Server
division.
For OffiSync,
the move represents an interesting turn after the company
positioned the technology as a way to access
Google Apps, Google Docs and Google search from within any Microsoft Office or
SharePoint application. Users could also save Office documents in Google Docs.
Google
(NASDAQ:GOOG) went on to
buy DocVerse and create Google Cloud Connect,
which lets users save their Word documents in Google Docs. This negated any
need to work with or acquire OffiSync.
Jive, the most
successful standalone social-business software maker with 15 million users, is expected to go public,
if not this year, then in 2012. LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) went public May
19, and its shares soared to over $122 at one point on the opening day of trading.
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