Enterprise social networking company Jive Software files for $100M IPO

Business social networking company Jive Software has filed to go public and raise up to $100 million, according to a filing today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Jive Software supplies enterprises with internal social networks similar to Facebook. An employee can create a profile and interact with co-workers much in the same way they do on Facebook — by posting content, commenting on it, sharing files and interacting with some other third-party enterprise software providers. Jive Software, along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net, is taking many of the lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook and applying them to the enterprise.

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“I think it’s good for the space, where Jive and Yammer agree is the potential for social networking to transform the enterprise,” enterprise social network Yammer chief executive David Sacks told VentureBeat. “Both of us are pursuing that, I think it’s good that we have a company in the space who’s filed.”

The company lost $16 million in the second quarter this year, up from a loss of around $7 million in the second quarter of 2010. But the company’s revenue has increased sequentially each quarter for the past six quarters. Jive brought in $18 million in revenue in the second quarter this year, up from $10.5 million in revenue in the second quarter last year. The company brought in $46 million in revenue last year.

Around 41 percent of Jive’s revenue is derived from our private cloud instances, compared to 59 percent of revenue derived from the company’s public cloud customers for the first six months of the year, a Jive spokesperson told VentureBeat.

Jive is more than 10 years old and has said it has 13.6 million users and 635 customers, including the likes of Hewlett-Packard and T-Mobile. An earlier report indicated the company had 3,000 customers. The company specializes in social networking software that exists on in-house servers, compared to cloud-based remote servers used by Yammer.

“Jive is a 10-plus-year-old company, it has a fairly traditional distribution model behind the firewall,” Sacks said. “They need this IPO to happen because they’re losing so much money.”

Yammer has three million verified corporate users, and 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. It uses a freemium model that gives away some services for free and then charges for premium services. Box.net, another enterprise company that uses the freemium model, currently has six million users and around 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

“I’m incredibly excited about it, I think it’s gonna be great for the category, great for showing there’s maturity in these next-generation software companies in the enterprise,” Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie told VentureBeat. “You tend to go public only at a certain scale, it’s a fairly strategic business tactic.”

Jive raised $57.5 million total before it filed to go public. The company’s most recent round of funding closed in July, 2010, when the company raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. Sequoia Capital owns 36.2 percent of Jive Software while Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers owns 14.2 percent of the company.

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