Jive Software Orders Up $100M IPO

Jive Software Aug. 24 filed for an initial public offering worth $100 million, a bid to follow LinkedIn (NASDAQ:LNKD) as the second public company that provides social media software for businesses.

There is no set date for the IPO.

Jive’s core product, Jive Engage Platform, helps colleagues, co-workers and often their partners communicate and collaborate with user profiles, group forums, status updates and other tools used in modern social networking.

The company has sold its social collaboration software to 635 enterprise customers, including such notables as HP (NYSE:HPQ), McAfee (NASDAQ:MFE), SAP (NYSE:SAP) and Informatica (INFA). Some 15 million users leverage Jive, sold on a subscription basis, to augment their workflow.

This user base helped the company to sales of $46.3 million in 2010, compared to $30 million the year before, according to Jive’s S1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Through June 30, 2011, Jive revenues totaled $34 million.

However, the company took a loss of $30.6 million through June 30, as it has spent liberally to prepare for its IPO by building out infrastructure, its sales force and marketing.

Jive in March also picked executives from Google, Facebook, McAfee and Informatica to serve on its board of directors in preparation for this IPO.

The company later spent money acquiring Proximal Labs for big data expertise and Offisync for integration between the Jive Engage Platform and Microsoft Office. This is a particularly important technology fusion for Jive customers because Office is the market-leading collaboration platform.

These buys should fortify Jive’s competitive positioning versus enterprise social network products such as IBM Lotus Connections, VMware’s Socialcast, Microsoft SharePoint and Salesforce.com’s Chatter, among other smaller rivals.

Jive has raised $57 million in funding, from Sequoia Capital, which owns 36.2 percent of the company; Kleiner Perkins, which owns 14.24 percent; Matthew Tucker with 15.75; and Dave Hersh, who owns 7.26 percent.

Jive’s IPO bid comes months after LinkedIn took its social networking Website for professionals public in May, when the company opened trading at $45 a share and quickly stormed to $85 a share. LinkedIn posted better-than-expected sales of $121 million for its first quarter.

Jive would like to capture some of LinkedIn’s market mojo, though it’s unclear when it will go public.

“We need to work with the SEC during its comments process,” a Jive spokesperson told eWEEK. “We don’t know how long this process will take as it often takes longer than expected. After completion of the process, the Board and our investment bankers will determine when we price based on a number of factors including whether the market conditions are favorable.”