Moxie Software rides social wave to big growth

Moxie Software, purveyor of social networking solutions for the enterprise, says that 2011 was a strong year for the company — so strong, in fact, that it added 75 new customers and boosted recurring revenues by 40 percent.

Now, there are plenty of vendors who try to bring cloud-hosted social functionality to the enterprise market: Yammer and Salesforce.com’s Chatter come to mind. But Moxie takes a slightly different approach by enabling what it calls “external multi-channel communications,” basically turning any business into its own contact center and enabling customers to communicate with employees directly.

“We’re in the business of questions being asked and answers being delivered,” says Moxie CEO Tom Kelly.

As a privately-held company, Moxie Software isn’t obligated to go into deep financial detail on its 2011 performance. But Moxie is boasting that those 75 new customers translate to an overall 30 percent boost to new customer acquisitions in 2011, with an attendant 40 percent rise in recurring revenues. The company also increased its margins by twenty points.

Moreover, Kelly says that 79 percent of existing Moxie customers deepened their usage in 2011, which contributed to quadrupled sales of the Moxie Employee Spaces collaboration platform from last year.

Going forward, Kelly says that Moxie is in a good place to grow. In fact, Moxie’s press release indicates that the company is angling for 50 percent sales growth and 40 percent revenue growth in 2012, with an eye towards profitability in the second half of the year. Currently, Moxie is primarily funded by VCs Oak Investment Partners and Foundation Capital (though Moxie isn’t disclosing any sums), but Kelly says that the next 12 months will see at least one more round of funding.

It seems like the enterprise market is really ready for social networking. In fact, Kelly says that Oracle’s late-2011 acquisition of RightNow, some of Moxie’s most direct competition, validates his company’s overall strategy.