Jive Software Rakes in $30 Million for Social CRM
Anyone wondering how much potential the market for social CRM has should look no further than the $30 million investment in Jive Software from two of the top venture capital firms.
The third round of funding was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with continued participation from Sequoia Capital, the only venture investor in Jive until now. It is the largest joint investment by the two VC firms since they put $25 million into Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) in 1999.
“Social Business is the most important enterprise software category in a decade,” Ted Schlein, managing partner at Kleiner Perkins and a former Symantec executive, said in a statement. “Jive is the clear market leader, with a strong customer base, best-in-class technology and a deep management team. Jive is poised to become the next great enterprise software company.”
The money will be used “to accelerate Jive's technology innovation and further drive the company's leadership in the social business market,” Jive said in a press release. Schlein will join Jive's board of directors.
Jive's SBS offering “combines the power of community software, collaboration software, social networking software and social media monitoring offerings into an integrated social platform,” according to the company, which noted that the SBS market is projected to grow more than 25 percent a year to nearly $5 billion by 2013.
Jive was one of just two companies dubbed market leaders in Gartner's social CRM Magic Quadrant.
According to Gartner, Jive grew its sales by 85 percent last year to an estimated $30 million.
“Jive delivers integrated blogs, wikis, ratings, rankings and voting, user profiles, dashboards and user interfaces, and a broad range of social capabilities, which enable it to serve both internal and external users,” Gartner analysts wrote in the Magic Quadrant report. “Jive has integrated social-media monitoring and can connect to content repositories and enterprise applications.”
Jive recently announced plans for its own apps market, a Jive developer community, and an agreement with Twitter to license Twitter's Firehose for use within its analytics product, Gartner said. The company also offers the ability to bridge conversations between internal and external communities.
The company promotes the use of open-social standards and the development of interoperability standards between social vendors, including the OpenSocial framework, Gartner said. Jive provides LDAP integration with corporate directory standards, and connectors for Microsoft Office and SharePoint.
Paul Ferrill has been writing for over 15 years about computers and network technology. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering as well as a MS in Electrical Engineering. He is a regular contributor to the computer trade press. He has a specialization in complex data analysis and storage. He has written hundreds of articles and two books for various outlets over the years. His articles have appeared in Enterprise Apps Today and InfoWorld, Network World, PC Magazine, Forbes, and many other publications.
