Sales grew by 53 percent over the year-ago period to $22.5 million, which beat the average estimate of analysts by more than $1.5 million, while Q4 billings of $36 million were up 40 percent. Plus, the IPO raised more than $180 million in cash.

And while that’s all good, on an old-school GAAP basis, Jive finished the quarter with a $12.7 million loss that was roughly twice the size of the loss in the year-ago period. While that may seem at first to be kind of a bad thing, it’s not. Since Jive sells subscriptions, it defers a lot of its revenue to later periods, so the revenue it does book doesn’t readily outweigh the costs it incurs to get the sales growth done. This is common with SAAS companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, who also tend to run net losses on a GAAP basis, but focus on their non-GAAP results, which are more indicative of the state of the business.

I talked briefly with CEO Tony Zingale about this and other things, after he finished up his conference call with analysts. A summary of our chat is below, and below that is an interesting infographic that Jive’s PR team included with the earnings release. I thought it was a nice touch, so I’m sharing it here.

AllThingsD: Tony, for those who don’t know, walk us through the key metric in your results that, in your mind, made this a good quarter for you.

Zingale: Growth. Growth in revenue. It’s further amplified in a new market where growth is the paramount metric, and of course it’s measured against a path to profitability. And we communicated that in our guidance to the analysts. But it’s all about growth. If you can’t capture market share as measured by deals with large enterprises and paying customers, then the profitability metric comes into greater play. Plus, in SAAS software companies, profitability always lags because of the ratable revenue model.

How are you finding life as the CEO of a public company? I know it’s not new for you, specifically, but it’s new with this company.

I think it is a testament to social becoming viable and real in the enterprise. You’ve been following the story for more than a year. You can’t go public without recurring, substantial growth, and the kind of customers and the kind of growth as measured by the repeatability of the model. All at the same time, you have to continue to innovate, fend off the competition and deliver that value. It feels good to have cleared the bar of going public, but otherwise, it’s back to work.

Let’s talk about the competition. Are you seeing certain people out of deals where they show up against you?

We do exceptionally well in a head-to-head competition, especially when we see a request for proposal. We’re seeing more of those as we go into 2012. It lends credibility to the social business space, as corporations are thinking of social software as a line item in their budgets. The competitive landscape hasn’t changed. It continues to be the large enterprise software players like Microsoft and IBM. And certainly Salesforce.com shows up when we’re competing for business in the sales department, and a little bit in the marketing department. Salesforce is very well-entrenched in these situations. But we coexist with them all the time. But the landscape hasn’t changed much. It’s competitive in the early part of the process. But when it comes to competing inside and outside the enterprise — the flexibility of our delivery model and the strength of our reference customers — the competitors tend to fall away.

Salesforce just announced that it is buying Rypple, an oddly-named outfit that specializes in performance management and goal-setting. It’s a cloud-based platform for giving employees feedback on how well they do their jobs, and which attempts to make the annual performance-review process — dreaded by so many employees and managers — less, well, dreadful.

Salesforce says in its press release that it plans to relaunch Rypple under the name Successforce, which to me sure sounds a lot like SuccessFactors, the cloud-based HR software outfit that software giant SAP acquired earlier this month for $3.4 billion. That makes the third acquisition of a cloud-based software firm in recent months. Oracle, you’ll remember, acquired RightNow for $1.2 billion in October. Expect a new round of speculation around other companies in the space, chief among them Taleo, whose stock has picked up considerably since the SuccessFactors deal, but which was down today.

Rypple’s customers run the gamut: Facebook is mentioned as one of them in the press release; Spotify was named as another in a Wall Street Journal blog post earlier this week. Jive Software, a social enterprise software outfit that IPOed this week, is another.

Financial terms haven’t been disclosed, but Rypple’s investors include Bridgescale Partners and EdgeStone Capital Partners, as well as several individual investors, including Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder.

Salesforce’s statement follows; below that is a short video explaining what Rypple does:

Salesforce.com Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Rypple — First Step Toward Human Capital Management for the Social Enterprise

Acquisition marks salesforce.com’s first step into Human Capital Management

Rypple’s next generation social performance management app to be re-launched as “Successforce”

New HCM business unit to be run by John Wookey

Rypple to extend value of existing salesforce.com products

Hundreds of companies like Facebook, Gilt Groupe, and Spotify embrace Rypple’s new social model to empower teams to share goals, recognize great work, and improve performance

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 15, 2011 — Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/), today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rypple, a cloud-based social performance management company. The acquisition signifies salesforce.com’s entry into the human capital management (HCM) market for the social enterprise. Salesforce.com plans to re-launch Rypple as “Successforce” and create a new HCM business unit, which will be run by John Wookey. Rypple’s unique social technologies will also extend the value of salesforce.com’s existing core products. The transaction is expected to close in salesforce.com’s fiscal first quarter ending April 30, 2012, subject to customary closing conditions.

Comments on the News
• “Salesforce.com and Rypple share a vision for extending the social enterprise to transform the way we work,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “The next generation of HCM is not just about a cloud delivery model, it’s about a fundamentally better way to recruit, manage and empower employees in a social world.”
• “Our social enterprise strategy continues to accelerate, and is at the root of the broad-based transformation and innovation we are seeing from customers today,” said John Wookey, executive vice president, advanced applications, salesforce.com. “With the launch of Successforce, salesforce.com plans to revolutionize HCM starting with an exciting social performance management app that will delight millions of employees around the world.”
• “We chose Rypple to be the core of Facebook’s employee performance management platform because it’s designed from the ground up to be social,” said Tim Campos, CIO, Facebook. “We are delighted to see it become part of salesforce.com’s social enterprise strategy.”
• “Rypple was designed from the start to be fun, social, and mobile — an app that can delight managers and employees in entirely new ways,” said Daniel Debow, co-CEO and co-founder, Rypple. “As the leading social enterprise company with more than 100,000 customers worldwide, salesforce.com will allow us to not only strengthen our offering for the hundreds of high-performing organizations that use Rypple today, but also scale it to reach many more.”
• “We took the science of team performance and applied the collaborative, transparent, and real-time power of social networks to create a completely new model for managing people and the work they deliver,” said David Stein, co-CEO and co-founder, Rypple. “Salesforce.com gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise and extend our vision for Rypple with Successforce.”

Salesforce.com Redefines HCM for the Social Enterprise
Traditional HCM software that many businesses use today was designed 30 years ago for personnel departments whose goal was to minimize the cost and risk of employing people. While HCM software hasn’t changed in decades, the way people work has radically changed.

Today’s workforce demands new performance and leadership tools that are completely transparent and allow employees to be connected to their company’s mission and each other. Social enterprises and progressive HR leaders are embracing apps like Rypple, which focus on the inherent social nature of performance management — goal setting, feedback, recognition and continuous dialogue — to help employees align more effectively around the company mission.

The acquisition of Rypple and its planned re-launch as Successforce signify salesforce.com’s entry into the HCM market. The company plans to expand into other areas with a new social model that will revolutionize the way companies recruit talent, build teams, empower employees and achieve results.

The new HCM business unit, including Successforce, will be led by John Wookey, salesforce.com’s executive vice president of advanced applications. Wookey comes to salesforce.com with more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software, including senior leadership positions at Oracle and SAP.

Extending the Value of Salesforce.com’s Existing Products
A social revolution is taking place today. The number of social networking users has surpassed e-mail users. Nearly a quarter of all time spent online is spent on social networks like Facebook. People access the Internet more from mobile devices than from desktops. Today, companies must change the way they collaborate, communicate and share information with customers and employees to stay competitive. Salesforce.com is helping companies meet the challenge of this social revolution with its social enterprise strategy.

With this acquisition, salesforce.com will embed some of Rypple’s next-generation features into its existing products. For example, people will be able to thank colleagues, win badges and provide recognition – all from within Salesforce Chatter. And customers of core Salesforce products — the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Force.com platform — will be able to connect with new employee feedback tools to help drive business goals and power the future of their employee social networks.

Rypple: Pioneers of Social Apps
Founded in 2008, Rypple pioneered a new approach to performance management — one that empowers managers and their teams to learn faster and perform better. Rypple is a social performance app built for the way we work today — in real time. With Rypple, teams can share key priorities and get the continuous feedback, coaching, and recognition they need to consistently achieve their goals, making performance management painless and effective. Hundreds of companies including Facebook, Gilt Groupe, and Spotify use Rypple’s social performance app, which is based on 50+ years of behavioral science, focusing on what really keeps people passionate about their work.

Details Regarding the Proposed Acquisition
The transaction is expected to close in salesforce.com’s fiscal first quarter ending April 30, 2012, subject to customary closing conditions. The transaction is not expected to have a material impact on revenue for FY13. Salesforce.com will initiate EPS guidance for fiscal 2013 on its fourth quarter conference call in February.

About Rypple
Rypple is web-based social performance management software that helps managers and employees improve performance through social goals, continuous feedback and meaningful recognition. Designed to build a transparent, results-driven work culture, Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with an easy, social and collaborative approach so people know where they stand and are accountable for achieving their goals. Hundreds of high-performing organizations use Rypple, including Facebook, Gilt Groupe, Kobo, Mozilla and Rackspace. Founded in 2008, Rypple is funded by Bridgescale Partners, Edgestone Capital Partners, Peter Thiel and a veteran team of angel investors. Learn more at www.rypple.com.

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.

At that price, the business-software company has a market value of roughly $688 million.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

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.

Basically, the argument goes like this: Since the protestors in Egypt organized and collaborated via Facebook and Twitter against a government that didn’t understand the tools, companies that don’t embrace social enterprise and collaboration tools like Chatter will wind up like Mubarak — overthrown, or rather defeated by their competitors.

Yes it’s a stretch, but you certainly can’t fault Benioff on the passion and enthusiasm of his delivery. And since it’s a Salesforce.com event — Cloudforce New York — there’s no one to yank him off the stage.

There will also be news. Benioff will talk about a new mission for Radian6, the social media monitoring outfit that Salesforce acquired in March for $326 million. Expect to hear him talk about the “social marketing cloud” quite a bit.

What does that mean? Radian6 will be getting some new features around engaging and messaging sales leads and contacts on Facebook and Twitter and Web forums, and so on. It will have some powerful tools for filtering all the junk that people post and look for places where people are expressing clear sentiment or intent to buy, asking for guidance, or maybe looking for a deal.

In an example Salesforce showed me in a demo yesterday, if someone is looking for an online stock broker and asks their Twitter friends for a recommendation or about a specific broker they’re thinking of, that company’s social media team will see the message, classify it as a sales lead, and can reach out with special offers. The same thing goes for customer service messages. When someone is unhappy about something — say, their cable service — those posts can be automatically assigned to the right person for a follow-up, a special offer, or whatever the case may be.

People so often turn to Twitter and Facebook to give feedback or to express outrage about products these days, and companies are still figuring out how to respond and work with those platforms. It’s all about protecting brands.

Benioff’s talk takes place against the backdrop of a lot of uncertainty around Salesforce’s share price, valuation and growth prospects. Salesforce stock has been slapped around a bit following an earnings report that analysts didn’t exactly love, yet you can’t deny its revenue growth rates are impressive: Salesforce is on its way to being a $3 billion company next year.

The problem with Salesforce is how the market should calibrate its valuation. The shares have traded as high as $160 and as low as $109 this year, and closed yesterday at $110.58. Premarket sentiment this morning shows Salesforce stock headed up about 3 percent as of 8:08 am ET. Some people — namely hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson — have argued that Salesforce is fairly valued at about 75 percent lower than where it’s trading now. Expect Benioff’s comments today to give the shares a lift. But given how volatile the shares have been, don’t expect it to last.

The main one is Box.net, the red-hot cloud storage and collaboration start-up. Yammer users will now get notifications that new files have been uploaded.

Another Yammer integration that will get attention is Zendesk, the cloud-based help-desk service. If your job involves helping people with their IT troubles, Yammer can publish help-ticket updates as different people work on them.

Expensify is a cloud-based expense-reporting service. I’m not sure I see the point of broadcasting anything about expense reports to coworkers. But if you’re a boss, and you need to do a little public praising and/or shaming around the size of expense reports (or people who file theirs chronically late), then I guess it could make some sense.

TripIt is a cloud-based travel and itinerary management service. The Yammer integration will let you know when a coworker is traveling, about to travel, or has come back from a trip.

The other two: Badgeville, which helps companies create loyalty programs through the creation of Foursquare-like game-and-badge programs; and Spigit, which aims to get employees sharing ideas in order to better “tap into the collective intelligence of an organization.”

These aren’t the first integrations with other services that Yammer has done, and certainly not the last. The first three were NetSuite; Salesforce.com’s Chatter, which was kind of meant to tweak Salesforce a bit; and Microsoft’s SharePoint.

The other piece of news out of Yammer today is that it has debuted something it calls its Activity Stream Ticker, which is a live-streaming side module on the homepage that looks an awful lot like the new activity stream on Facebook. Well, if it looks familiar, that’s because it is based on Facebook’s Open Graph protocol. In fact, Yammer is starting to look less like “Twitter for work” and more like “Facebook for work” all the time. (To see what I mean, click the image below for a bigger screenshot.) You can argue that knowing what music your friends on Facebook are listening to isn’t all that useful. But it might be useful to know who in the office is out on a trip, and who is available for that important meeting.

I talked with Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni, who told me it all comes down to working with the open APIs of pretty much any service. That means there will be a lot more integrations like this.

And it makes perfect sense. While there’s a lot of activity around social enterprise software and collaboration services — Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff can’t stop talking about the subject — Yammer has quietly emerged as the market’s leader, on track to have four million verified corporate users. And last month it landed a $17 million Series D round of funding from the Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya.

It’s the third board seat that Schwartz has taken since leaving Sun. He also sits on the board of Taleo, a cloud-based talent management software company, and has a seat on the board of SilverSpring Networks, a smart-grid outfit.

He’s also the CEO of Picture of Health, a start-up focused on applying technology to problems in the health care field.

So what is Moxie? It plays in the same space that Jive Software, Yammer and Salesforce.com’s Chatter do. Its software not only connects employees internally, but with customers and partners as well. It’s the kind of “big theme” that Schwartz likes. “If you’re a company, you have to interact with the customer,” he said to me last night. “Now, do you want to dump a product spec on them, or do you want to captivate their interest over a long period of time? To me, it feels like an I.Q. test.”

Moxie’s software is used in 270 million individual social enterprise interactions per month, and its customers include the consumer electronics companies Epson and Sharp, as well as the Web retailers Newegg.com and Tupperware.

Schwartz, who is also on the board at SilverSpring, was approached for the Moxie board seat by Warren Weiss, a director and lead investor in Moxie and a general partner at Foundation Capital. Weiss and Schwartz are both alums of Next, the Steve Jobs-owned computer company that Apple acquired in 1996, beginning its legendary turnaround.

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.

And how often does a start-up host its own conference for partners and developers? Box.net did that today, too. It was from there that CEO Aaron Levie called me today after delivering a keynote address. I began by asking him about the new syncing service, but naturally what I really wanted to know about was the funding.

AllThingsD: Talk about your syncing feature. What’s that all about?

Levie: Basically, in the consumer space you see a lot of technology that helps you synchronize your information. It’s one of the biggest trends in software and the cloud. And so what we’re trying to do here is just do that for the enterprise. You have to take a different approach. The scale of the management and the security and the collaboration and getting it into business work flow, that’s what makes it enterprise ready. We’re syncing on the Mac and the PC and it’s going to work in your enterprise.

And you’re going to get to other devices — the iPad and Android devices — later?

Yeah. Syncing has a different connotation and purpose on a tablet because you’re syncing less data, but core sync for Mac and PC is what’s going to change the game in the enterprise space.

You’ve done some social things, too. We all know there’s a lot of buzz around social collaboration in the enterprise. Where does Box.net fit there?

That relates to two major themes that we’re really focused on. We’re trying to be the most open platform that you can be. That’s really the power of the cloud. So, unlike Microsoft, where they want you to integrate all their technology together so that you’ve got one big Microsoft vertical stack, our vision is that you’ll use different best-of-breed tools to solve different problems. So you’ll use Salesforce.com for CRM and Google Apps, and Workday or Netsuite. And we really want to integrate the content you have in Box securely with all those applications. And that is now a really big deal for the social space. So our vision is to work with Yammer, Jive and Chatter and any other kind of leading service that emerges so you can take your content from Box and use them with those services. And one thing we announced today is that Salesforce has invested in Box and that we’re working on integrating with Chatter. We’re also going to be building some direct social features into Box directly.

So let’s talk about that round of funding. It’s supposedly $50 million and Salesforce is in. Who else is in?

There’s a little confusion about this. The funding hasn’t been announced officially yet. It is more than $50 million. And yes, Salesforce is in. We’ll say more about it after it’s all closed.

You’ve also disclosed new numbers around customers, right?

We have 7 million users and 100,000 businesses, and it’s being used in 77 percent of the Fortune 500.

Let’s go back to the syncing. How does it work in a practical sense?

You install Box Sync on your Mac or PC, you can synchronize that information back and forth automatically to the cloud. If you add collaborators, they can access that information too. And then on top of that are the social features. We want you to be able to comment, and get a work flow going, to see the updates from the people around you.

You had a big conference today, which I think is your first. Isn’t having a conference like this a big deal for a company that’s still really just a start-up? Who’s there and what do they do?

It’s really a customer and partner conference. I think it will evolve over the years. It’s about CIOs and IT leaders who want to be more innovative using the cloud. It’s also for our partners who are are here to support our customers as well. So you’re seeing companies like Google Chrome, Motorola, Okta, Good Data, Netsuite, and Yammer. They all have booths and are talking about how they integrate their data with the cloud.

I understand you’re working with a little company that’s also based in Palo Alto called Hewlett-Packard. What’s that about?

Box Sync is going to be on small business PCs, and then eventually on their enterprise PCs as well. Eventually part of our vision is to get Box Sync on any system that is creating content.

Is it true that you turned down a $500 million offer for your company?

It is true that people are talking about that. We’re not saying much about that. The high level is that it’s a super-exciting space, and there are companies that want to accelerate their growth into it. We’re focused on staying independent and growing Box. We’ve only completed about 1 percent through the vision of this company.

There are three big announcements coming in Benioff’s remarks, and they’re all connected to Chatter, the social enterprise service that Salesforce promoted in a pair of TV ads that aired during the Super Bowl; Chatter will appear as part of the next upgrade to Salesforce.com, called Winter ’12. The whole idea is to deliver a Facebook- or Twitter-like experience that supplants traditional collaboration methods like email and meetings. Salesforce says its clients who use Chatter are seeing email volume decline by 30 percent; meetings decline by 27 percent.

The first is Chatter Now, which will deliver real-time collaboration within Chatter itself. You’ll be able to see if your colleagues are signed in and available in real time — kinda like on AOL instant messenger or Skype — and you’ll be able to chat and share your screen without leaving your Chatter feed.

The second is Chatter Customer Groups. You don’t need to collaborate just internally, but also with people you do business with. You’ll be able to invite people from outside your company into your Chatter network, and can set rules on what they’re allowed to see and do.

Third is Chatter Connect, which is intended to entice software developers to work Chatter into other enterprise applications — many people think this is where the real action is in the social enterprise field. Ask the soon-to-be-public Jive Software, which can add social features to, among other applications, Microsoft Office. There’s also Yammer, which grabs social feeds from any application that has them, including, uh, Chatter. It’s not the newest idea under the sun, but Salesforce is off to a respectable start: Its first conquest is Microsoft’s collaboration software, SharePoint.

Finally, Benioff will talk about mobile devices. He’s a big fan of Apple’s iPad and has regularly talked about its popularity among enterprise customers. And while Salesforce.com has been available as a dedicated app through the iTunes App store for some time now, it’s about to get a lot more flexible through the iPad browser. Salesforce will announce touch.salesforce.com, which it says will bring the power of HTML5 to enterprise applications.

If HTML5 doesn’t mean anything to you, then you missed one of the more significant controversies about Apple’s iOS devices. They don’t support Adobe Flash, because Apple argues that Flash — which is used widely for Web video and animation — is clunky on mobile devices and drains batteries too fast. When it comes to multimedia and rich experiences on the Web, Apple prefers HTML. So touch.salesforce.com will be the place where users of iPads, iPhones and scores of other mobile devices will be able to go and get an experience that’s geared to their device without having to compromise on the Salesforce features they’re accustomed to on their desktops. Additionally, developers will be able to build their own apps, and all 220,000 apps built using Salesforce’s Force.com development platform will work with HTML5, as well.

That’s an awful lot for one CEO to talk about, and Benioff is a busy man. But, as in the past, he’s not too busy to give TV interviews that coincide with the Dreamforce conference. While he’s regularly found on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” on Monday he showed up on Bloomberg West for a chat with Emily Chang.

The highlight comes early in the interview, when Benioff links the Arab Spring — which has been propelled in part by Facebook- and Twitter-using protesters who have toppled a couple of dictators, most notably Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and now apparently Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Companies are falling, too, Benioff says, but they have a fighting chance to survive if they get a little more social. Get it? Chang, to her credit, doesn’t let this pass without calling it an “extreme analogy.” She then goes on to quiz him about Salesforce landing Groupon as a customer. (And revealing that Groupon CEO Andrew Mason went to Davos. Who knew?)

What else about Salesforce is extreme? Its price-to-earnings ratio is insane, at 602 times trailing earnings; which, of course, leads to the question of whether or not Salesforce is overpriced. Benioff, true to form, dodges the question. It’s all about growing the topline and gaining market share now, he says. No change there. Enjoy the video:

Jive has more or less been telegraphing its IPO intentions since it hired Tony Zingale as its CEO last year. Zingale is the former head of Mercury Interactive who engineered its $4.5 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard in 2006. Then in March it bulked up its board with a slate of directors who all have public company experience, among them Dave Dewalt, the former president of McAfee, and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Heck, Jive has even been acting like a public company, making the occasional acquisition — two in the last several months.

The way Bloomberg tells it, Jive is being valued at $1 billion and would offer a stake worth 10 to 20 percent in the company in the IPO. And research firm Gartner pegs its annual revenue at $70 million. It’s the leader in the social enterprise software field, which is all about making the workplace more collaborative by making office applications more social, a la Facebook, Twitter and the like. (In fact, one of Jive’s newest directors is Jonathan Heiliger, VP of technical operations at Facebook.)

There’s been a lot of action in this space of late, beginning with Salesforce.com’s launch of Chatter at the start of the year with a pair of TV ads during the Super Bowl. Other players have either been growing like crazy and raising boatloads of cash (example: Yammer) or have been acquired (example: Socialcast.)

(I caught up with Zingale for a quick chat at the D9 conference in June. See the video below.)

This deal would amount to another big win for Morgan, which has led the IPOs of LinkedIn and Pandora, among others. An IPO would probably bring a nice payout to Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, which have plunked down $57 million in venture capital funding.

I called Jive to see if anyone there would comment and got zilch, but what do you expect from a company that’s going IPO? Not that I blame them. With investment bank lawyers skulking around every corner, everyone gets too nervous to so much as confirm the time of day. It made me think of the old Bee Gees hit “Jive Talkin’,” which I’ve shared with you — and hereby dedicate to the employees of Jive Software as they go through this process. No one at Jive is talking. Get it?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110817/jive-software-said-to-hire-ipo-bankers-but-no-one-there-is-talking/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110321/asana-hires-coo-type-van-sant-first-biz-side-hire-for-group-collaboration-start-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20110321/asana-hires-coo-type-van-sant-first-biz-side-hire-for-group-collaboration-start-up/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:19:47 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41770

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110321/asana-hires-coo-type-van-sant-first-biz-side-hire-for-group-collaboration-start-up/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/social-enterprise-apps-are-popular-and-so-is-attacking-chatter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/social-enterprise-apps-are-popular-and-so-is-attacking-chatter/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:06:57 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2938 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 .

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/social-enterprise-apps-are-popular-and-so-is-attacking-chatter/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:39:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40053

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100302/is-apple-finally-worried-about-amazons-music-store/ http://allthingsd.com/20100302/is-apple-finally-worried-about-amazons-music-store/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:14:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=16893 Amazon’s MP3 store hasn’t done much to weaken Apple’s grip on the digital music business. But that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t paying attention.

Big music label folks say Apple (AAPL) has long complained about their involvement with Amazon (AMZN). But recently, Billboard reports, those complaints have become more specific. The trade magazine says Apple is asking the labels not to push new releases via Amazon’s “Daily Deal” promotion, which offers new records at cut-rate prices.

Warning! There’s some salty music-label-executive language in this excerpt:

In exchange for a Daily Deal promotion on a new album, Amazon has been asking labels to provide it with a one-day exclusive before street date and such digital marketing support as a banner ad on an artist’s MySpace page and messages on label and artist Web sites and social network feeds.

“When that happened,” [a major-label head of sales] says, “iTunes said, ‘Enough of that shit.’”

Sources say that iTunes representatives have been urging labels to rethink their participation in the Amazon promotion and that they have backed up those warnings by withdrawing marketing support for certain releases featured as Daily Deals.

In response, label executives at Capitol, Capitol Nashville and Jive recently opted against participating in Daily Deal promotions they had been considering for Corinne Bailey Rae’s “The Sea,” Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now” and Ke$ha’s “Animal,” sources say.

Billboard notes that the labels are still working with Amazon on Daily Deal promotions. But it says they are pulling back on prereleases and exclusives for big records and pushing smaller artists that Apple isn’t likely to shower with promotional support.

Today’s Deal: $3.99 for Sony artist Raheem Devaughn’s new album, which doesn’t appear in iTunes “New and Noteworthy” section.

I’ve asked Amazon, Apple and all four of the big labels–Universal, Sony (SNE), EMI and Warner (WMG)–for comment, but I’m not holding my breath.

But assuming that Billboard is right here–and reporter Ed Christman has been covering music retail forever–it’s interesting to note that Apple is pushing back a bit more forcefully at Amazon. (Industry trade Hits DailyDouble reported something very similar in January).

If I’m Jeff Bezos, I’d take that as a compliment. And then I’d go back to worrying about Steve Jobs’s entry into the e-book market.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100302/is-apple-finally-worried-about-amazons-music-store/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081124/get-yer-free-britney-spears-here-or-on-imeem/ http://allthingsd.com/20081124/get-yer-free-britney-spears-here-or-on-imeem/#comments Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:39:09 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1398 Give the music industry credit–a decade after the original Napster, it’s now standard practice to let fans listen to an entire disc worth of new music, for free, before it ever gets to stores. The latest example: Britney Spears’s new album, “Circus,” which you can listen to at iMeem.com. Or at the bottom of this post, via a groovy embeddable player.

This move should temporarily boost traffic at iMeem, which finds itself competing for the ability to premier new releases with rival music services like iLike, MySpace, Rhapsody, et al. Last week, for instance, MySpace got bragging rights over “Chinese Democracy,” the sort-of-long-awaited album from Guns N’ Roses.

But it’s unclear whether these premieres actually help Britney or her label, Sony’s (SNE) Jive: Few of the visitors to MySpace’s GNR page stuck around to listen to the whole album, and hordes of GNR fans don’t seem to have flooded Best Buy (BBY) stores, which have an exclusive on the disc.

But who cares? That’s tomorrow’s problem. For now: Free Britney Spears!

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