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Cisco Posts Results In Line With Street Expectations

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:14:32 +0000

Cisco Systems just announced results for its third fiscal quarter and they’re pretty much what the Street anticipated.

Revenues were $11.6 billion, up 6.6 percent from the year-ago quarter, while per-share earnings on a non-GAAP basis were 48 cents, versus 42 cents a year ago, up 14 percent. That’s essentially right in line with what the consensus of Wall Street analysts had expected Cisco to report: $11.58 billion in sales, and 47 cents in per-share of earnings, with a penny-per-share beat on the EPS front.

I’m going quickly through the numbers, but here’s the announcement in full so you can look for yourselves. I’ll be dialing in to the conference call shortly and will be talking to CEO John Chambers after that.

Cisco shares are headed lower in after-hours trading. As of 4:45 pm ET, shares are down 48 cents to $18.30, or 2.5 percent.

Update: Cisco just issued its guidance on the conference call. CFO Frank Calderoni says that Cisco expects to report revenue to grow 2 percent to 5 percent year over year in the fourth quarter. It also expects to earn a gross margin in the range of 61 percent to 62 percent on a non-GAAP basis. Operating margins should be 26.5 percent to 27.5 percent, up about a point from the year-ago quarter. EPS will be 44 to 46 cents a share. The outlook is lower than the consensus of 49 cents.

On this, the shares have continued to fall after hours. Cisco shares are now, as of 5:02 pm ET, down more than 8 percent, or $1.55, to $17.23. Investors clearly don’t like what they see. Tomorrow looks like it’s going to be a rough day.

SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwire -05/09/12)- Cisco (CSCO)

Q3 Net Sales: $11.6 billion (increase of 7% year over year)

Q3 Net Income: $2.2 billion GAAP (increase of 20% year over year); $2.6 billion non-GAAP (increase of 11% year over year)

Q3 Earnings per Share: $0.40 GAAP (increase of 21% year over year); $0.48 non-GAAP (increase of 14% year over year)

Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, today reported its third quarter results for the period ended April 28, 2012. Cisco reported third quarter net sales of $11.6 billion, net income on a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis of $2.2 billion, or $0.40 per share, and non-GAAP net income of $2.6 billion, or $0.48 per share.

“We delivered solid results this quarter with record revenue and non-GAAP earnings per share,” said John Chambers, Cisco chairman and CEO. “We are successfully executing against our long-term strategic plan of growing profit faster than revenue, and in a cautious IT spending environment, we continue to outperform our competitors.”

Chambers continued, “In a world of clouds, video and mobile device proliferations, the role of the intelligent network has never been greater and our value proposition with our customers is the strongest it has ever been. Our vision and strategy is focused on the right market transitions, and I want to thank our shareholders, employees, customers and partners for their ongoing commitment to Cisco.”

GAAP Results

Q3 2012 Q3 2011 Vs. Q3 2011
—————- —————- —————
Net Sales $ 11.6 billion $ 10.9 billion 6.6%
Net Income $ 2.2 billion $ 1.8 billion 19.8%
Earnings per Share $ 0.40 $ 0.33 21.2%

Non-GAAP Results

Q3 2012 Q3 2011 Vs. Q3 2011
————— ————— —————
Net Income $ 2.6 billion $ 2.3 billion 10.9%
Earnings per Share $ 0.48 $ 0.42 14.3%

Net sales for the first nine months of fiscal 2012 were $34.4 billion, compared with $32.0 billion for the first nine months of fiscal 2011. Net income for the first nine months of fiscal 2012, on a GAAP basis, was $6.1 billion, or $1.13 per share, compared with $5.3 billion, or $0.94 per share, for the first nine months of fiscal 2011. Non-GAAP net income for the first nine months of fiscal 2012 was $7.5 billion, or $1.38 per share, compared with $6.8 billion, or $1.22 per share, for the first nine months of fiscal 2011.

A reconciliation between net income on a GAAP basis and non-GAAP net income is provided in the table on page 5.

Cisco will discuss third quarter results and business outlook in a conference call and webcast at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time today. Call information and related charts are available at http://investor.cisco.com.

Other Financial Highlights

Cash flows from operations were $3.0 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2012, compared with $3.1 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, and compared with $3.0 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2011.

Cash and cash equivalents and investments totaled $48.4 billion at the end of the third quarter of fiscal 2012, compared with $46.7 billion at the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2012, and compared with $44.6 billion at the end of fiscal 2011.

During the third quarter of fiscal 2012, Cisco repurchased 27 million shares of common stock under its stock repurchase program at an average price of $20.28 per share for an aggregate purchase price of $550 million. As of April 28, 2012, Cisco had repurchased and retired 3.6 billion shares of Cisco common stock at an average price of $20.47 per share for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $74.3 billion since the inception of the stock repurchase program. The remaining authorized amount for stock repurchases under this program is approximately $7.7 billion with no termination date. During the third quarter of fiscal 2012, Cisco also paid a cash dividend of $0.08, or $432 million.

Days sales outstanding in accounts receivable (DSO) at the end of the third quarter of fiscal 2012 were 31 days, compared with 31 days at the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2012, and compared with 37 days at the end of the third quarter of fiscal 2011.

Inventory turns on a GAAP basis were 11.5 in the third quarter of fiscal 2012, compared with 11.1 in each of the second quarter of fiscal 2012 and the third quarter of fiscal 2011. Non-GAAP inventory turns were 11.1 in the third quarter of fiscal 2012, compared with 10.8 in the second quarter of fiscal 2012, and compared with 10.3 in the third quarter of fiscal 2011.

Select Global Business Highlights

Cisco announced its intent to acquire NDS Group Ltd., a provider of video software and content security solutions. The acquisition is expected to help Cisco’s ability to transform how service providers and media companies deliver next-generation video experiences to subscribers.
Cisco completed the acquisition of privately held Lightwire, Inc. Lightwire develops advanced optical interconnect technology for high-speed networking applications. The acquisition is expected to allow Cisco to deliver cost-effective, high-speed networks with the next generation of optical connectivity.
Cisco acquired privately held ClearAccess, Inc. The acquisition enhances Cisco’s network management capabilities and enables service providers to better deliver, manage and monetize their services.
Cisco announced strategic investments in Brazil to foster innovation, transformation and socio-economic development.

Cisco Innovation

Cisco announced it has updated its cloud-ready switching portfolio to enhance network virtualization with simplicity and scale.
Cisco announced a successful demonstration and validation of its coherent 100G dense wavelength division multiplexing solution, exceeding 3,000 km in reach without the need for regeneration. This distance is 50 percent farther than any non-Raman alternative solution on the market today.
Cisco introduced the industry’s first carrier-grade, end-to-end Wi-Fi infrastructure to deliver next-generation hotspots. The technology is designed to deliver seamless mobile experiences and enables operators to support a continuing expansion of mobile traffic, devices and new services.
Cisco announced innovations across the Cisco Unified Computing System® (UCS) that quadruple memory capacity, double switching capacity and simplify management for large-scale Cisco UCS® deployments.
Cisco introduced new Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Routers with app-enabled capabilities for new home experiences. The three new routers offer wireless performance and support for Cisco Connect® Cloud.
Cisco announced it expanded its small business product portfolio with new wireless access points, routers, switches, unified communications and partner-managed service offerings.
Cisco and NetApp announced FlexPod was the first data center infrastructure solution to be validated by Microsoft for the updated Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 2.0 program.

Select Customer Announcements

TELUS announced it has deployed key components of the Cisco Videoscape™ platform to extend its Optik TV services to mobile devices.
Cisco announced it has been chosen by Fastway Transmissions Private Ltd. to facilitate cable digitization deployment across its customer base in India. Fastway is expected to deploy more than two million next-generation digital set-top boxes from Cisco during the next two years.
Magyar Telekom rolled out 4G LTE services with Cisco mobile internet solutions. Magyar Telekom is Hungary’s largest telecommunications company.
IPLAN chose Cisco technology for its newest data center which is expected to be launched in June 2012. IPLAN is a leader in telecommunications and cloud computing services for small and medium-sized businesses in Argentina.
Videotron launched its enhanced illico digital TV service with Cisco’s HD set-top box platform. Videotron is a leading Canadian telecommunications operator providing communications and broadband entertainment services.
Peru Credit Bank implemented the Cisco Unified Communications system to increase business flexibility and reduce costs.
Kabel Deutschland (KD) selected Cisco CRS-3 routers for its Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network core to meet demand for video and broadband services. KD is Germany’s largest cable operator.
Netelligent announced that it will collaborate with Desktone, Inc. to offer cloud-hosted virtual desktops. These cloud-based solutions will include Cisco UCS, the Desktone desktops-as-a-service (DaaS) platform and NetApp storage systems.

Editor’s Note:

Q3 FY 2012 conference call to discuss Cisco’s results along with its business outlook will be held at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time, Wednesday, May 9, 2012. Conference call number is 888-848-6507 (United States) or 212-519-0847 (international).
Conference call replay will be available from 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time, May 9, 2012 to 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time, May 16, 2012 at 866-493-8039 (United States) or 203-369-1749 (international). The replay also will be available via webcast from May 9, 2012 through July 20, 2012 on the Cisco Investor Relations website at http://investor.cisco.com.
Additional information regarding Cisco’s financials, as well as a webcast of the conference call with visuals designed to guide participants through the call, will be available at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time, May 9, 2012. Text of the conference call’s prepared remarks will be available within 24 hours of completion of the call. The webcast will include both the prepared remarks and the question-and-answer session. This information, along with GAAP reconciliation information, will be available on the Cisco Investor Relations website at http://investor.cisco.com.

About Cisco

Cisco (CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

Back in Its Skinny Jeans, Cisco Systems Looks for Fat Profits

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:25:41 +0000

Networking giant Cisco systems will report quarterly earnings today after the markets close in New York, and the pressure will be on CEO John Chambers to show that the changes made as a result of the companywide restructuring he led last year — the one that made Cisco look like it was fitting back in its skinny jeans — are taking permanent hold. The question is whether or not it can start delivering some fatter profits.

The consensus of Wall Street analysts has Cisco reporting $11.6 billion in sales, and 47 cents per share of earnings.

The big question, writes analyst Sanjiv Wadhwani of Stifel Nicolaus in a note to clients on May 7, will be around margins. Last quarter, Cisco gave guidance for gross margins — a key measure of profitability — with a narrow range of 61.5 percent to 62 percent, while operating margins were guided to the range of 27 percent to 28 percent. Wadhwani thinks that guidance may stand up as pressure on Cisco’s supply chain from the Thailand flooding, favorable pricing on switching products, and a less-aggressive posture from Hewlett-Packard’s networking arm are all providing a little breeze at Cisco’s back.

Yet one product in Cisco’s stable may, in success, be hurting margins overall: Cisco’s Unified Computing and Servers line (UCS) tends to carry a lower gross margin, Wadhwani writes, and so may eat into its overall gross margin. The product line — which combines computing, storage and networking into a single product offered to corporate and service-provider data centers — had 10,000 customers worldwide last quarter, and was showing “positive momentum” in Wadhwani’s checks. “Overall, we believe that there is intense focus on margins internally, which should allow the company to report an in line margin quarter,” Wadhwani wrote.

Cisco has been operating “with more confidence and aggressiveness with its refreshed product line, making it tougher for competitors,” writes Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee in a note to clients issued May 7, and has been a lot of the reason that Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent have missed expectations recently. He expects Cisco to give guidance for the quarter ending in July that’s more or less in line with consensus expectations. He also sees Cisco benefiting from Apple’s next iPhone: “We believe this could mark the fourth quarter in a row where Cisco does not guide down expectations further building investor confidence. We see Cisco benefiting in the second half of 2012 from the continued build-out of 4G LTE wireless infrastructure ahead of the iPhone 5 refresh likely in the September-October time frame.”

I’ll be covering Cisco’s earnings announcement later today. Having dedicated songs to CEO John Chambers two quarters in a row now, I’m going to have to scramble to see what song fits today’s results, because I just know he’s going to ask.

Hollywood Burns

Eric Johnson — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:38:58 +0000

Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice. Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica.

– From Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s keynote address at the Internet Society’s INET convention in Geneva

Yammer Makes Its First Acquisition: OneDrum

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:02:26 +0000

A little more than a month ago, the social enterprise and collaboration start-up Yammer raised an impressive $85 million funding round at an implied valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion or maybe a little lower.

One of the things the company signaled it was going to do with that money was make acquisitions. Today it announced its first: OneDrum, a British start-up that specializes in making Microsoft Office a lot more collaborative.

Financial terms aren’t being disclosed, and OneDrum is a pretty early-stage company with 10 employees and combined $2 million in capital raised, mainly from angels and Amadeus Capital Partners, a British VC firm. But, the deal is invariably going to be compared to a similar one announced last year by Yammer rival Jive for OfficSync.

I talked to Yammer CEO David Sacks about the deal earlier today and I asked him about the comparison. He said that one thing OneDrum does that OfficSync does not is a level of desktop synchronization that’s comparable in some ways with what you find with something like DropBox. And, it does so without the need for a plugin that might, he argues, mess up how Office runs and which can be difficult to deploy across an enterprise.

Basically, Yammer customers will be able to share and see the contents of the folders they share with other people via Yammer. Also, people can collaborate on Office documents live. Changes are tracked within the Yammer news feed and revisions are stored. Once you drag a document into your Yammer folders, the contents are instantly text searchable from within Yammer.

What OneDrum lacked, Sacks told me, was “a good front end to express the OneDrum technology,” which Yammer will readily provide.

Salesforce Shows Off Its Rypple Acquisition, Analysts Applaud

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:35:37 +0000

Remember that crazy sequence of acquisitions, in recent months, of cloud-based companies who specialize in Human Resources?

First there was SuccessFactors, which went to SAP for $3.4 billion in December. And last month, Oracle stepped up to take out Taleo for $1.9 billion. These deals took place against the backdrop of the expectation that Workday, another cloud-based HR software outfit that last year raised $85 million at an eye-popping $2 billion valuation, is well on its way to going public this year.

Amid all of this there was a much quieter and smaller deal: Salesforce.com acquired the cloud HR start-up Rypple.

Yesterday, we saw the first fruits of that acquisition, integrated in an impressive six weeks. In one of his heavily produced keynote addresses at Salesforce’s Cloudforce event in San Francisco, CEO Marc Benioff showed off how the Rypple acquisition is being integrated directly into Salesforce’s main service as an add-on app in the company’s App Exchange. He’s something to see in action, and manages to bring together numerous strands as a way of making his arguments for the cloud and the social enterprise.

The video below is about two hours long, but one section caught my attention: Salesforce has landed Hewlett-Packard as probably its biggest customer, and has been talking about it since it last reported earnings. At about the 90-minute mark, Benioff starts talking about Salesforce’s relationship with HP, and chats with HP EVP John Hinshaw. HP will be live on Salesforce.com in May, and will have its entire sales force of 35,000 using it by the end of the year. Look for Salesforce to play up this relationship as often as it can in the coming year.

So what did the critics — and by that I mean the analysts — think of it all?

One key observation came from Karl Keirstead of BMO Capital Markets: “We spoke with HP’s CIO, who said that the recent deal with Salesforce was for sales force automation and partner management modules only and that there was no existing plan to replace Jive Software with Chatter as its employee collaboration platform.” Ouch. Jive: 1. Chatter: Zero. Even so, Keirstead raised his target price on Salesforce shares to $190 from $175, and maintained his “outperform” rating.

Keirstead also said he expects to see Salesforce move into the “social recruiting” space as a natural extension from the Rypple acquisition. I’ve written about one upcoming company in the space, called Jibe (not to be confused with Jive).

Other Wall Street analysts appeared to like what they saw. Brian Schwartz of ThinkEquity Partners conducted a survey of 50 corporate IT managers and found that they plan to increase their spending on Salesforce products by an average of 12 percent this year. That, he argues, could lead to a 30 percent increase in annual billings by the end of the year, when combined with the addition of new customers and gains from other CRM vendors.

Salesforce is winning acceptance in many large enterprises, and that’s a good sign for its business, writes Brendan Barnicle of Pacific Crest Securities in a note to clients today. The social enterprise is real, and Salesforce is playing a pretty big part in making it happen at large companies. “It appears that Salesforce is at a tipping point where deals are getting larger and the product mix is getting more diverse,” Barnicle wrote. Now that Salesforce has 15 million end users at 100,000 customers, it’s starting to upsell those customers on new things beyond its core Customer Relationship Management service, including the new Rypple service, Chatter, and other things. He rates Salesforce a “buy,” with a $200 price target.

Anyhow, here’s Benioff’s keynote from yesterday, if you have two spare hours to watch it:

Video streaming by Ustream

Collaboration Start-Up Atlassian Acquires HipChat

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:30:46 +0000

Amid the current craze for enterprise collaboration software, somehow Atlassian had escaped my attention. Ten years old, based in Sydney and San Francisco, backed by a $60 million investment from Accel Partners and sporting annual revenue north of $100 million, Atlassian makes collaboration tools for software developers.

Today, Atlassian will announce that it has acquired HipChat, a maker of a specialized private instant messaging and chat platform aimed at companies. Financial terms are not being disclosed. But it’s pretty apparent the two were made for each other. HipChat has some 1,200 customers, including Groupon, HubSpot and Wired. The plan is pretty simple: Atlassian will incorporate HipChat into its own software. There’s probably a good bit of overlap between them.

HipChat’s three founders — Pete Curley, Garret Heaton and Chris Rivers — are all joining Atlassian. Their history, as described on their Web site, is pretty basic: “We created HipCal. Plaxo liked it so we went to work for them. We created Plaxo Pulse. Comcast liked it, so we went to work for them. HipChat is our current baby.” Now add: “Atlassian liked it, so we went to work for them.”

I talked briefly with Atlassian president Jay Simon yesterday. “None of our tools has a real-time component,” he told me. “They’re all asynchronous. HipChat is going to give us that.”

People often flock to the basic tools, like AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, when they need something instant. HipChat does the instant messaging part, but it also has features like chat rooms that remain persistent, which means they don’t blink out of existence when people using them leave. Files can be shared easily, and APIs from other platforms are supported. It’s also secure.

Consider Atlassian a variant on the social enterprise and collaboration trend that’s been rocking the enterprise in recent years, with the appearance of companies like Jive Software, Yammer, Saleforce.com’s Chatter and VMWare’s Socialcast, to name a few. Atlassian’s tools (its main one is called Jira) allow teams of software developers to work together, keep track of what each member of a team is doing, squash bugs and do whatever else it is they need to do. And among its 20,000-odd customers are the kind of companies you’d want to be doing business with: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Adobe, LinkedIn and Cisco Systems. Pay attention now, because someone is going to buy this company.

A Visit With Box.net's Aaron Levie at His New Office (Video)

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 23:25:00 +0000

The last time I saw Box.net CEO Aaron Levie, he was visiting New York. I was able to get him to sit still long enough for a video interview on The Wall Street Journal’s Digits show.

Yesterday, I returned the favor with a visit of my own, and not just on any day, but on the day that the cloud computing start-up that’s growing at the speed of light moved into its new headquarters in Los Altos, Calif. (But really it’s south Palo Alto!)

Box now has 400 people, and they had been badly crammed into its founding offices and spread out between a pair of satellite offices. Now everyone is all in one place. And yes, it looks every bit the young start-up it purports to be, with scooters and hammocks, swings in the hallways and conference rooms named for goofy things. But what do you expect from a company started barely seven years ago in a USC dorm room?

Naturally, I took the opportunity to talk with Levie for an update on Box, the state of its business (hint: Pretty good) and his view of the competitive landscape (hint: Interesting). Also? I rode the slide that dominates the entryway of the new office. Well, it is a fast way to get down to the first floor.

[ See post to watch video ]

Investors Sure Love Them Some Jive Today

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:22:34 +0000

Shares of Jive are getting a lot of love today, in part because of a positive mention over the weekend by our friends over at Barron’s. As of 2:20 pm ET, Jive’s share price was up 7.5 percent to $18.36, which is nearly as high as it has traded ever, which was earlier today. Not bad for a company that priced at $12 a share less than three months ago.

Jive, you’ll remember, is the social enterprise software company whose cloud-based and on-premise-based software enables employees at large companies to collaborate and share information as readily as they do on Facebook or Twitter. Investors who might have been shut out from Facebook’s IPO filing may want to go after a smaller, more accessible target that’s just like Facebook — social — but which also has a clear, concise and limited mission to make workplaces more productive.

Last week, Jive reported quarterly results for the first time, and there’s certainly plenty to like. Its net loss wasn’t quite so bad as analysts had expected, while sales grew 53 percent and spurred its billings — a key metric for cloud companies who sell their software on a subscription basis — up 46 percent during the year. It signed new customers like Thomson Reuters, Starbucks and Verizon in the last year.

Jive went public late last year, only days before Zynga went, too, and so a lot of people missed out on Jive’s excitement.

All the love from the markets has me wondering who will be next among the cloud companies to take the public plunge. Workday, the cloud-based HR software company run by Aneel Busri, which last October raised $85 million at an implied valuation of $2 billion, was last seen looking for bankers to get it through an IPO sometime this year.

Workday will no doubt get a lot of attention due in no small part to the acquisitions of Taleo by Oracle last week and of SuccessFactors by SAP in December. But it will also get a lot of attention for the fact that many of its most recent institutional investors are the same ones who invested in Facebook: Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley and Janus among them. That makes for a nice tasty Facebook comparison right there. We’ll find out soon enough if investors see it that way.

Check Out Who's Getting Rich on Jive's IPO Today

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:59:59 +0000

Shares of Jive Software will debut for trading sometime after 10 am ET, after officially pricing last night at $12 a share, higher than the range of $8 to $10 a share originally expected.

At that price, Jive will debut with a market capitalization of nearly $700 million, and has raised about $161 million.

The offering will amount to a nice payout for Jive’s investors and shareholders. Based on the reported share holdings in Jive’s S-1 filing with the SEC, here’s how some of them are making out — assuming the share price stays at $12:

Sequoia Capital: 16.95 million shares, amounting to more than one-third of Jive’s equity, worth $203.4 million.
Kleiner Perkins: 6.7 million shares, worth $80 million.
Bill Lynch, Matthew Tucker: Jive’s co-founders own 7.1 million shares each, amounting to combined equity of nearly 32 percent, worth $85 million apiece.
CEO Tony Zingale, the former CEO of Mercury Interactive who oversaw its sale to Hewlett-Packard, has 3.6 million shares, worth $43 million.
John McCracken, Jive’s senior VP of worldwide sales, has 784,000 shares, worth $9.4 million.
CFO Bryan J. LeBlanc has 694,000 shares, worth $8.3 million.
Bill Lanfri, a Jive director, former CEO of Big Bear Networks (a Sequoia investment), and a founding investor in RedBack Networks, has 581,000 shares, worth $7 million.
Robert F. Brown, Jive’s senior VP of client services, has 434,000, worth $5.2 million.
Brian J. Roddy, senior VP of engineering, has 429,000 shares, worth $5.1 million.

Jive Software Will Start Trading Tuesday

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:01:06 +0000

Shares of Jive Software, the social enterprise and collaboration software company, will price today and debut on the Nasdaq exchange tomorrow morning, sources familiar with the matter tell AllThingsD. The debut will cap a process that began in August when it filed its first form S1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Last month, the company estimated it will sell 11.7 million shares in a price range of $8 to $10. Lead underwriters on the deal are Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs with Citigroup, UBS, BMO Capital Markets and Wells Fargo also participating. At $10 a share, Jive would be valued at $573 million.

The company’s executives have been on a road show in recent weeks. You can see CEO Tony Zingale give a 32-minute talk complete with slides on the company on the Web site Retail Roadshow.

The IPO will mark a nice exit for venture capital investors Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins who have backed Jive to the tune of $57 million in three rounds, the largest of which came in August of 2010.

The deal also takes place against the backdrop of a sudden surge in interest in enterprise software companies, particularly those that run in the cloud. SAP snapped up the cloud-based HR software player SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion earlier this month, while in October Oracle acquired RightNow for $1.4 billion.

Along with Taleo, Jive will quickly become part of the conversation concerning cloud-based acquisition targets.

While initially Jive’s software was delivered as an on-premise, behind-the-firewall product, it has in recent months been boosting its cloud-based business. In its original S1 filing, it said that as of the six months ended in June, it derived 59 percent of its sales from cloud-based software.

Hewlett-Packard Offers Box on Some Business PCs

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:59:38 +0000

Box.com is everywhere these days. The cloud storage and collaboration platform has been gaining new customers at an impressive clip — 7 million users at 100,000 companies at last count — and landing new investments.

In October, Box CEO Aaron Levie told AllThingsD that it was planning to eventually work with Hewlett-Packard to get the service installed on HP personal computers sold to businesses. Today the companies will announce that deal.

Depending on the machine, HP will offer a year of Box storage for free or for a reduced rate on certain Compaq-branded business PCs. Buy an HP Compaq 8200 Elite through the Smart Buy program and you get a Box.com account with unlimited storage for a year. Buy an HP Compaq 6200 or 6205 Pro series machine through Smart Buy, and you can get a free Box account with 10 gigabytes and the option to upgrade at a reduced rate.

It’s the second time that Box has announced a collaboration on HP hardware. The first was on the ill-fated TouchPad tablet that HP killed over the summer. Box has also recently announced collaborations with other cloud services like Yammer and Salesforce.com’s Heroku, among others.

Box.net CEO Aaron Levie Takes His Show to New York

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:00:45 +0000

Fresh off of landing an impressive $81 million expansion round of venture capital funding from the likes of Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures, Aaron Levie, the precocious 26-year-old CEO of Box.net, hit New York yesterday and stopped by for a visit.

Levie was in town to meet with Box.net customers and to talk a little about the Box Innovation Network, which will encourage companies to build applications around Box.net, the file sharing and collaboration cloud service that has won business from 100,000 companies, including 77 percent of the Fortune 500.

Too often, Levie says, companies build their applications for collaborating and sharing content around Microsoft SharePoint, or roll their own custom apps. “So what we’re trying to do is offer people a better environment to build those applications; much better than Sharepoint, and far better than anything on the market,” he says. “We’re going to run everything from the storage to the content management to the security — all of the nuts and bolts pieces that make building applications really annoying and not strategic, so you can go focus on the strategic part.”

Box already has some pretty good partnerships. As NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson noted yesterday, Box is one of that company’s partners, as is Google Apps, the cloud-based office application suite that is turning more companies away from Microsoft Office. And Salesforce.com is not only an investor but has been a Box partner since 2009.

More details about the Box Innovation Network will be forthcoming soon — including the names of the development partners Box is working with — so stay tuned. Levie talked about that, and about his longer-term plans for Box, on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” show yesterday:

[ See post to watch video ]

Asana Launches to Public -- Finally Moving Out of Private Beta

Kara Swisher — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:00:56 +0000

Asana, the high-profile group collaboration start-up founded by former Facebook execs, is moving out of private beta after a year, and will launch to the general public.

Currently in use by thousands of users at hundreds of beta companies, Asana said it will now put its efforts at tweaking the product to a wider test.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down,” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga, presumably so frustrated workers can achieve a digital form of nirvana.

The product can be used for free by teams of fewer than 30 users.

“Our beta users have helped us in shaping our prioritization in the workspace,” said Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Moskovitz said that the company — which raised $9 million in venture funding two years ago, and $1 million before that from Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and angel investors — is not in need of more funds and will not yet release a paid product.

Co-founder Justin Rosenstein added that one future direction will be the growth of the mobile application arena for Asana, which already has offerings.

Here are some screenshots of the Asana offering:

Jive IPO Filing Holds Clues to Valuation Mystery

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:59:20 +0000

Jive Software, the pre-IPO player in the red-hot social enterprise and collaboration business, amended its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last night. Among the new revelations are the exchange it has selected for its debut — the Nasdaq — and its four-letter ticker symbol. Think you can guess it? That’s right: JIVE.

The amendment also includes some new financial data. For the quarter ended Sept. 30, Jive reported a $7.6 million loss — which is in line with the year-ago quarter — on sales of $20.8 million; a 69 percent increase year on year. And for the first nine months of the year, its net loss, at $38.1 million, was 83 percent higher than a year ago; sales, at $54.8 million, were up 74 percent from a year ago.

Jive also disclosed how much it paid for OffiSync, the company it acquired in May — the acquisition allows Jive to make more socially aware applications for Microsoft Office. Jive paid $23.3 million for OffiSync, which included the issuance of 78,110 shares of stock worth $600,000, implying at the time that each share of Jive was worth about $7.68. This gives us a clue concerning the paper value of the shares of the company at the time of that deal.

Jive’s two main VC investors own more than half the company: Sequoia Capital owns 36.2 percent, while Kleiner Perkins owns 14.2 percent. Assuming that the $7.68 share price implied by the OffiSync acquisition still holds — which it probably won’t by the time the offering prices — Sequoia’s 16,975,233 shares would be worth $130.4 million, while Kleiner’s would be worth $51 million and change. CTO and co-founder Matt Tucker has a stake that would have been worth more than $54 million at the time of the OffiSync deal. Tony Zingale, the former head of Mercury Interactive, who helmed its sale to Hewlett-Packard and who was brought in to take Jive public, has a stake that would have been worth about $27 million at the time of the OffiSync deal. Again, take those valuations with a grain of salt, because they’re likely out of date by now.

Update: It turns out that, yes, that valuation from May is out of date. In September, Sequoia and Kleiner exercised warrants to buy shares, at $10.37 a share. So that would push Sequoia’s stake to north of $176 million, Kleiner’s to $69 million, Tucker’s to $73 million and Zingale’s to $37 million.

Elsewhere in the filing, we learn that Jive finished the quarter with $72.6 million in cash, and has whittled its long-term debt down to $26 million, down from the $33 million it listed in its initial S-1 filing in August. Much of that debt was taken on to get acquisitions like the OffiSync deal done.

Interestingly, the filing also contains a glance at OffiSync’s books, and it was clearly a tiny company just getting started. Through the middle of May, when the acquisition was concluded, it had booked $205,000 in sales. Assuming a constant run rate, it would have finished the year with about $600,000, meaning Jive paid about 39 times sales. A fair metric? It is, if Jive considered OffiSync’s capabilities a strategic feature, which it clearly did.

Cisco Acquires Collaboration Software Start-Up Versly

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:54:39 +0000

Networking giant Cisco Systems said it has acquired Versly, a privately held San Francisco company that makes collaboration plugins for Microsoft Office. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Versly had attracted seed funding from Accel Partners and Baseline Ventures.

Jive's IPO Filing Gives First Look at Its Finances

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:40:44 +0000

Social enterprise software concern Jive filed on Wednesday for the $100 million initial public offering it has been steadily marching toward. Its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission gives the first look at the company’s financials.

Jive finished 2010 with $46.3 million in sales and a $27.6 million net loss. For the first six months of 2011, sales were $34 million and the loss increased to $30.5 million.

If Jive keeps growing its sales at a consistent rate, it should hit $68 million in sales this year, and would break the $100 million barrier — widely considered to be a key milepost for companies going public — in 2012.

Its problem will be its mounting expenses. Research and development costs — $18.3 million in 2010 — are already on track to hit $30 million this year, while sales and marketing expenses will, at their current pace, hit $40 million this year, up from $29 million last year.

The classic argument companies always make for this is that spending is necessary to grow the business. And it’s a fair argument to make. Social enterprise software and services — which aim to make typical business applications more like social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — is a fast-growing business. And Jive has landed some big customers: Hewlett-Packard, SAP, T-Mobile and investment bank UBS. As CEO Tony Zingale told me at D9, Jive’s software is in use by some 15 million people in 635 companies.

Having raised about $45 million since 2007, including a $30 million round led by Kleiner Perkins last year, Jive is relatively well capitalized. It has $46.6 million in combined cash and cash equivalents, but has also run up a long-term debt of $33 million.

A big piece of that debt comes from an acquisition. In May, Jive acquired OffiSync, as part of its effort to bring social functions to Microsoft Office and Outlook. Financial terms weren’t disclosed at the time, but Jive says in the filing that at least $20 million of the $100 million it hopes to raise in the offering will go toward paying down a loan, due in 2015, that it obtained to do that deal.

Jive’s two main VC investors own more than half the company: Sequoia Capital owns 36.2 percent, while Kleiner Perkins owns 14.2 percent. Zingale owns a little more than seven percent.

iPhone Video App Collabracam Makes a Case for Co-Creation

Drake Martinet — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 03:38:34 +0000

If social media today means sharing, what is media co-creation?

Really social media?

That’s the premise behind Collabracam, an app for Apple iOS that is attempting to offer a new way to create video collaboratively, in real time by using the iPhone as both the directing and recording platform.

To understand how Collabracam works, it’s useful to think of the traditional television production experience the app tries to recreate.

In a TV studio, a director stares at a bank of screens in one room, while talking through headsets to multiple camera operators in the studio. The director then gives orders to the camera operators, such as “pan right” or “zoom in,” and finally cuts between the various cameras.

Similarly, using Collabracam, up to five people sharing a WiFi connection can use their iPhones to become director and camera-persons for an instant video studio.

One iPhone in the group is designated “director” and the others are “cameras.” The cameras stream live video to the director, who makes the decisions about camera switching and shot selection.

The app then spits out a single movie file on the director’s iPhone with the cuts that were selected during filming.

The idea man behind Collabracam is Kyle Hilla, a designer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He’s the sole employee of Apptopus Inc., the company that officially makes the app.

The inspiration for the app came from Hilla’s previous work at a community TV station.

“I was hauling around hundreds of feet of big, heavy cables,” he said. “I knew there had to be a better way.”

This kind of synchronous, multi-camera collaboration isn’t yet common in the app store.

But Hilla sees more on the horizon: “Bringing people together for social media creation is going to be the next big thing.”

And Hilla isn’t alone in his thinking.

Venture firms Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital and Silicon Valley Bank funded beleaguered app maker Color to the tune of $41 million, in an attempt to tackle similar questions.

And while Color has spent the last few months stabbing in the dark spaces of multi-user media and storytelling as well, Hilla explained that Collabracam is designed to be different.

“Collabracam is for deliberate creation — it’s not passive,” he said.

The team aspect of Collabracam’s user experience may hold part of the key to cracking the group-media creation nut.

But Collabracam has its barriers to adoption.

The app is useless without a group of users, of course. And users have to be able to think about recording video in parts and they have to work as a team.

Still, Hilla said some interesting use cases have popped up, giving some Brazilian videographers who used it as a pre-production tool to make a video storyboard before moving on to making the real thing with HD cameras as a good example.

That’s an outlying consumer audience, of course, but Hilla thinks it’s a good start — he chatted about this and more via Skype video from Michigan:

[ See post to watch video ]

Is Cisco Undervalued? At Least One Analyst Thinks So.

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 23:28:27 +0000

Shares in the networking giant Cisco Systems are trading at more than 38 percent off their 52-week high and haven’t recovered a bit since investors shunned it following an earnings report that contained a relatively negative outlook. Today, in a research note to clients, Brent Bracelin, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Ore., made the case that investors aren’t giving it enough credit.

The way Bracelin sees it, sales in Cisco’s new business lines such as Unified Computing System–Cisco’s cloud hardware offering–as well as wireless LAN and collaboration products, could triple to $10 billion in 2013 from $3.3 billion in 2009, and could generate a combined operating margin of 25 percent and could account for 20 percent of overall sales.

Too iffy for you? There’s more. Yes, investors are clearly unhappy with the drop in sales of switching products, historically an important Cisco business segment and indeed its biggest segment so far, accounting for 31 percent of sales last year. And they should be unhappy about it. But? Cisco’s non-switching business is on pace to deliver $30 billion in sales this year, Bracelin says, more than double what it did in 2005. This means the non-switching business is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 12 percent, more than double the five percent seen in switching. If all goes well the contribution to earnings of the non-switching business to per-share earnings could be 97 cents in fiscal 2011 and could reach $1.50 by 2014.

Still not convinced? There’s more. The sell-off has pushed Cisco’s valuation metrics to significant lows versus its peers in the tech industry. At $17 a share, Cisco’s market cap of $94 billion works out to an enterprise value to EBITDA ratio of less than five. By comparison, Microsoft trades at more than six times EV/EBITDA, IBM’s ratio is north of eight, Oracle’s is about 10 and Qualcomm’s is nearly 13.

And? That $40 billion in cash that Cisco has on its books is worth more than $5 a share. Meanwhile, investors have turned up their noses at Cisco’s switching business to such an extent that they now value it at only $3 a share while the non-switching business is valued at more than $9 a share. In 2008, the switching business was valued at more than $8 a share. “The sell-off, based on competition and margin erosion, now appears overstated,” Bracelin wrote.

So what does he think it’s worth? Add up all the parts and you get a company that could be valued at anywhere from $20 to $28 a share. And that’s assuming the value of the switching business improves only a little bit. All in all, Cisco shares could be undervalued at anywhere from 17 percent on the low end to 63 percent on the high end.

Investors, however–at least for today–didn’t buy Bracelin’s argument. Cisco shares fell 11 cents to close at $17.04 a share. That’s only seven cents a share higher than its 52-week low from last month.

Asana Hires "COO-Type"–Van Zant First Biz Side Hire for Workplace Collaboration Start-Up

Kara Swisher — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:19:47 +0000

As it gets ramped up for a wider launch, Asana, the high-profile workplace collaboration start-up founded by top former Facebook execs, has hired former SolarWinds product strategy exec Kenny Van Zant in a “COO-type of role.”

Van Zant, who will be Asana’s first business-side hire, has also worked at a variety of tech companies, including Cisco.

Co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein remain at the top of the leadership at the productivity software company, which–perhaps in keeping with its yoga-style name–does not have official titles.

But Van Zant will essentially fulfill the COO role, focusing on bringing Asana to the enterprise market in a socially-fueled, “bottom-up” approach.

“We now have a great product and are ready for our next phase of bringing it to the market,” said Moskovitz, in an interview this afternoon with BoomTown. “While Justin and I continue to work on product and engineering, Kenny will be the driver of that launch.”

Specifically, in a blog post today, Moskovitz wrote:

“Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.”

Asana, which is aimed at helping people work on projects together in groups, is now in private beta.

It tackles the often unexciting, but very large and problematic, workplace collaboration and communications software market.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga, which presumably means the product will help frustrated workers achieve a digital form of nirvana.

The San Francisco-based start-up, which has raised $9 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, now has 15 employees.

Asana had previously garnered just over $1 million in an angel round, which included a spate of Silicon Valley bigwigs.

Still, it has not, thankfully, received the intense hype of other innovative start-ups from former Facebookers–hello, Quora!

That said, many who are using Asana think it will make a huge splash as it is rolled out and attempts to bring consumer-style tools to the workplace.

There are, of course, a range of companies doing this in different ways–from Jive to Yammer to LinkedIn and to a variety of cloud-based enterprise efforts by Google and Microsoft.

In an interview, Van Zant said the time was ripe for big changes in the way enterprise-aimed products were bought and sold.

“I will be focused on selling our enterprise software product from the bottom up, rather than targeting the CIO,” said Van Zant. “It is clear the world of enterprise is being impacted by consumer behavior.”

While he does not start until Monday, Van Zant speculated that Asana’s free product offering will remain, with a premium version to come.

Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who made the Asana investment for the firm and is on its board, said the time is right for such businesses aimed at enterprise transformation.

“Kenny wrote the book on this at SolarWinds,” he said. “The consumerization of the enterprise isn’t going to happen–it already has.”

Here is a demo video Asana put out in February of an open house, as well as the blog post from Asana on the Van Zant hire:

Asana Open House from Jerry Phillips on Vimeo.

Justin and I are excited to welcome Kenny Van Zant as the newest member of the Asana team. Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.

Until now we’ve focused primarily on developing the Asana product into the best of class solution for task management and project execution. Encouraged by positive feedback from the early adopters in our beta program, we’re now preparing for the company’s next phase–bringing this technology to the rest of the market–and we can’t imagine a better partner than Kenny to drive this strategy and build a strong organization to support it. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer the bottom-up distribution model for selling software and SaaS into enterprises and small businesses–a sales approach we plan to develop further at Asana. This experience, together with an almost uncanny overlap of values, made it clear that Kenny is the right fit.

While finding Kenny concludes a long search for the right leader of Asana’s business operations, we are continuing to grow the team, looking for passionate designers and engineers to join us in our common purpose: using software to help groups of people work together more effectively.

–Dustin

Kenny Van Zant is a technology entrepreneur with leadership experience in start-ups and public companies. Kenny was most recently the SVP and Chief Product Strategist for SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) from 2006-2010, where he was responsible for products, marketing, and corporate strategy. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer a disruptive business model for selling software and SaaS into the enterprise and SMB segments from the “bottom-up,” using inside sales, online marketing, free products, and a loyal user community. Based on a unique combination of growth and profitability, SolarWinds enjoyed a successful IPO in May of 2009.

Prior to SolarWinds, Kenny was the EVP of Marketing and GM of the Communications BU for Motive (NASD: MOTV) and the co-founder and COO for BroadJump (acquired by Motive), where he managed the company’s growth from start-up in 1999 to over $60M in revenue and 350 global employees within 3 years.

Kenny has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Google Turns Word Comments, A Necessary Office Evil, Into Discussions

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:00:23 +0000

One of the great annoyances of office life is collaborating on a written document. Once the original writer seeks feedback from more than one or two people, the process of wrangling the comments embedded in the multiple copies that have been sent around the office as email attachments quickly takes on a life of its own. Wouldn’t it all be easier if everyone’s comments appeared in a single, unified stream?

That’s the idea behind a new commenting system being introduced in Google Docs today. Comments have been converted into what Google is calling Discussions. And these discussions are comparable to the streams in so many social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, complete with the Twitter-like convention of “@ mentions” (A sample comment is pictured) but they’re also linked to email, so you can participate in the discussion without having sign into Google Docs. You can also tell who made a comment and when, as it includes timestamps, profile pictures and email notifications make it easy to keep track of the feedback process.

The feature is going live today, but only on new documents, and for those Google Apps users who have opted for the Rapid Release track on new features–those who haven’t will get it over the next week or so. A two-minute video below gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like.

Google's Cloud Connect Beta Is Over. Now Where's Office365?

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:37:24 +0000

Last November, when Google first announced its plans to give users of several versions of Microsoft Office the ability to sync their documents with Google Apps, Google’s line of cloud-based office productivity apps, and sought volunteers to try it out, thousands stepped up, and Google had to turn many away.

It’s called Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and it’s going live today for all Windows users running Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. (Sorry Mac users.) It’s a plug-in (reader Ben provides a download link in the comments below) that gives Office users in multiple locations the ability to edit and collaborate on Office documents at the same time. The new service grew out of Google’s acquisition of DocVerse last year.

Alongside the new service Google says it is launching a 90-day trial period that will allow companies that haven’t yet embraced the notion of cloud-based productivity and collaboration to try Google Apps for 90 days. Google is calling it the 90-Day Appsperience, and it’s available for what Google calls “a nominal fee.” Companies who take advantage of the trial get unlimited use of Google Apps for 90 days, plus support.

This is taking place as the competitive scrum between Google and Microsoft concerning cloud-based office tools heats up. Microsoft of course has the huge Microsoft Office franchise, which is the Big Kahuna within the Microsoft Business division, which reported $18.6 billion in sale last year. Its own cloud-based enhancement for Office, known as Office365, was first announced in October, but remains in a limited Beta test period, and so isn’t generally available. Microsoft has promised to release it generally during the ~~second half of~~ later this year. Google is clearly trying to take advantage by finishing its beta test of Cloud Connect well before Office365 is ready. Maybe this will spur Microsoft to speed it up a little.

Earlier this year, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher visited with Shan Sinha, former DocVerse CEO, who’s now product manager for Google Apps. In the interview below he talks about the learning process Google has been going through as it goes after the enterprise market.

[ See post to watch video ]

Box.net, The File Sharing and Collaboration Cloud For Businesses, Raises $48 Million

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:15:25 +0000

Box.net, the enterprise-oriented file-sharing and collaboration cloud service has raised a combined $48 million in venture capital funding and debt financing. Meritech Capital Partners is leading Box’s Series D round, with Andreessen Horowitz and Emergence Capital Partners joining prior investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. The round includes $10 million in debt financing from Hercules TGC.

It’s a big shot in the arm for Box, which has 5 million users and saw its revenue grow more than threefold last year, largely on business with 60,000 corporate customers including DreamWorks, Cisco Systems and Dell. Not bad for a company started in a dorm room as college business project.

I asked CEO Aaron Levie–the company started in his dorm room at the University of Southern California–what he’s going to do with all that money. “There’s a pretty significant transition underway from legacy on-premise systems to the cloud,” he says. “Two years ago it was a tool for medium sized businesses, and now we’re seeing much larger companies. Just the technology we have to build to serve those customers takes a lot of investment. We’re also going to invest in our sales team significantly.”

Use of Box.net is so easy–you can start for free sharing pretty much any kind of file–that by the time a company is talking formally to Box.net, it’s already an unofficial customer. “Our plan is to have Box.net surface [from free users] in these organizations, and then we have to sell it,” Levie said.

So why the mix of VC funding and debt? Infrastructure. Box operates two data centers in California and needs more. It can be cheaper to pay for that kind of infrastructure with debt, he said.

George Bischof, managing director at Meritech Capital, said that during the due diligence period before the investment, all the lawyers and investors involved had to use Box.net to give it a thorough going-over. “That was sort of the ultimate litmus test for simplicity if the lawyers and investors can use it well,” Bischof said.

Box.net sees itself as a rival to Microsoft’s Sharepoint, and threw down the gauntlet pretty hard in 2009 when it launched a bake-off challenge and handed out T-shirts declaring Sharepoint to be “Sharepoo.” Nothing grabs attention like starting a fight.

So does Levie want to take Box public? Sure, he says, but he’s in no hurry. “Now that we’re selling to larger companies, there’s actually a strategic reason to go public. Large public companies tend to more easily trust other public companies with their IT, so it turns out to be a competitive advantage. But it’s a few years out for us.”

Social Enterprise Apps Are Popular, and So Is Attacking Chatter

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:06:57 +0000

Get out your scorecards. There’s yet another social enterprise play to keep track of. And like all the others, it’s being actively marketed as an alternative to Chatter.com, the social enterprise app from Salesforce.com.

BroadVision today announced Clearvale Express, which it describes as a free and streamlined version of Clearvale Enterprise, its cloud-based business collaboration platform. It was created in part at the suggestion of Softbank, the Japanese telecom concern that is a partner on the product and will resell it in Asian markets.

Above, that’s an ad for Clearvale Express evoking the old “Pepsi challenge” ads from the early 1980s. In this case, Chatter is being portrayed as “Coke,” the established player being challenged by the upstart, which is silly because Chatter is a relatively new player in an increasingly crowded social enterprise market, though Salesforce is clearly the biggest among the new entrants.

Bashing Salesforce is suddenly trendy. On Sunday, Yammer and Socialcast were spotted buying text ads on Google using the word “chatter” in hopes of catching the odd Google user responding to the pair of TV ads for Chatter.com that aired during the Super Bowl.

And that followed an attack video put out by Yammer highlighting how Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff loved Yammer at a 2008 TechCrunch event and accusing him of basically copying it. You can see that video below. Then there’s Jive, which used an industry survey to try to make a case that it’s a worthier player in the space than Chatter or anyone else, for that matter.

I’m betting there’s more of this public pile-on ahead, though with luck it will be followed by a round of deal-making. Last year, Gartner estimated the 2011 market opportunity for all these apps at less than $800 million and said that it’s tracking at least 80 vendors, at least 50 of which are based in the cloud. That makes the social enterprise market seem like small potatoes at first until you see Gartner’s prediction that these apps will replace email–Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes–as the primary tool for collaboration in businesses for 20 percent of companies within three years.

Combine that with a longer-term shift away from email–by teens, college-age people and younger people entering the workforce–and toward communication via Facebook and things like it, and you’ve got the makings of a fundamental shift in what’s considered normal as workplace technology. No wonder they’re taking swipes at each other. It is, however, already getting old .

Salesforce.com Buys Manymoon for Between $25 Million and $35 Million

Kara Swisher — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:44:04 +0000

Salesforce.com has bought Manymoon, the social productivity start-up.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but one source put the sale at between $25 million and $35 million.

Manymoon makes one of the more popular tools on Google’s apps platform.

The San Francisco company, funded with only a small seed funding round by Harrison Metal, offers an online collaboration app that businesses and consumers can use to organize group projects, conversations, tasks or documents that are often done via email or other software.

Manymoon is rather typical of the innovative app makers the search giant has been courting to populate its marketplace.

Salesforce.com has been moving aggressively into social networking in the enterprise arena with its Chatter offering and more.

Earlier today, in fact, it was also part of a $4 million funding of Seesmic, the social dashboard app maker.

Here is the Manymoon blog post–which just went up–on the sale, as well as a video interview BoomTown did with its co-founders Amit Kulkarni and Manav Monga, just as Manymoon joined the Google Apps Marketplace store rollout in March:

Manymoon Acquired by Salesforce.com

February 1, 2011

Today we are excited to announce that Manymoon has been acquired by salesforce.com!

Manymoon has experienced tremendous growth since our launch, with more than 50,000 businesses adopting our social productivity app. We’ve launched on three major web platforms: Google Apps, LinkedIn, and the Google Chrome Web Store. We think we’re on to something special, building an easy-to-use application that integrates with the tools you already use to help you get work done. Over 1,000 new businesses choose Manymoon each week to track any type of work activity with anyone from anywhere.

We’re looking forward to even more growth in 2011, and are thrilled to now be part of salesforce.com, the leader in enterprise cloud computing, to continue to deliver an amazing social productivity application for everyone to use.

What Does This Mean for Manymoon Customers?

We’ll still be the Manymoon that helps you get work done. The Manymoon team will remain intact and will operate as a separate business within salesforce.com so we can continue our focus on building a great social app that makes our customers more productive and successful every day.

The Manymoon you know and love will remain the same:

* Manymoon Standard, our free product, will continue to be available for existing and new customers. In fact, we’ll continue to add features to our free product. And, if you want to upgrade, you are welcome to do that through the Manymoon website whenever you like.

* Existing premium features, subscriptions and price points will remain unchanged.

* Manymoon will continue to work with Google Apps, LinkedIn and the Chrome Web Store. And, we will continue to develop new features to enhance support of these platforms.

*We’ll continue to support our customers in the Manymoon Support Universe.

Salesforce.com and Manymoon Together

Our approach to the market remains unchanged: work with the tools that people already use online (Google Apps, LinkedIn, Chrome), build an app that requires no training or setup, focus on serving the daily productivity needs of professionals and be on the cutting edge of the latest technologies like HTML5. As we’ve grown, we’ve learned that serving customers is more than just building an app with nifty features. It includes providing scalability, security, performance and support–all areas in which salesforce.com has a proven track record.

Like most startups, we admire salesforce.com as the original cloud computing company that made this industry possible. Over the last 12 years salesforce.com has been an evangelist and driver for bringing applications, platforms and collaboration to the cloud. We’re excited to be part of their vision for cloud, social and mobile, utilize their knowledge and experience to build a world-class social productivity app, and move even faster in delivering new capabilities to you!

What’s Next?

We are going to invest more in what you’ve told us you like about Manymoon: Google Apps, LinkedIn and Chrome Web Store support. You can expect to see many of the key social productivity features you’ve requested released in the near future. We’re also going to be working on some exciting, new developments in the coming months…so stay tuned!

Thanks,

The Manymoon Team

[ See post to watch video ]

Seesmic Raises $4 Million in Funding From Salesforce.com

Kara Swisher — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:39:29 +0000

In an interesting social enterprise move, popular social networking collaboration tool Seesmic is taking a $4 million investment from Salesforce.com, as well as from Softbank.

The San Francisco-based Seesmic has one of the top desktop and also mobile applications for monitoring a consumer’s various feeds from Twitter, Facebook and more.

So far, Seesmic has received $16 million in total funding. Other investors include Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

Moving beyond a consumer app, where it has one million registered users, Seesmic has also worked closely with Salesforce.com on integrating its Chatter social enterprise network offering.

Deeper integration with Chatter and bridging more social communications with its customers is coming, said Seemsic founder and CEO Loïc Le Meur.

“It becomes an amazing internal dashboard if you are a manager,” said Le Meur in an interview with BoomTown this morning. “It has everything we have built for consumers, but internally.”

There are many such apps and software-based services being developed to inject social into the enterprise, including Yammer, Socialcast and Jive.

It will also be interesting to see if the investment is a prelude to an acquisition by Salesforce.com, to further bolster its own efforts in socializing the workplace.

Here is the official press release:

Seesmic Receives $4 Million Investment

SAN FRANCISCO–Feb 1, 2011–Seesmic, the leading maker of applications that monitor social networks across mobile devices, today announced a $4 million investment from salesforce.com, inc. and a Softbank Group company managed by Softbank Holdings Inc.

Seesmic helps companies monitor, engage and build their brands across social networks and mobile devices. The Seesmic Desktop provides a single console that lets companies view and respond, in real time, to comments being made about their brands in Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Seesmic Desktop works with Apple’s iPhone and Macintosh computers, smartphones running Google’s Android or [Microsoft] Windows Phone 7 mobile operating systems, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and on personal computers.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, and Softbank group join previous investors Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. Seesmic has received a total of $16 million, including the most-recent investment round.

Seesmic and Salesforce.com have worked closely for more than six months to create a seamless integration between Seesmic Desktop and Salesforce Chatter, the industry’s first enterprise social collaboration app and platform. Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook and Twitter–such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds–Chatter lets employees “follow” documents, people, business processes and application data. The result is a new level of productivity that crosses departments and organizational barriers. By integrating with Chatter, Seesmic Desktop will enable salesforce.com users to immediately see comments that customers have posted on Facebook and Twitter.

“Salesforce.com has become a valued partner as we work together to bridge external and enterprise social communication with Chatter. These investments will enable us to reach more enterprise customers” said Loïc Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic.