But when you’re a company with a lot of industrial-grade Internet infrastructure, including, say, a few of your own data centers, the rules can change a little bit, and you have the option of being a little more selective in determining how your data flows. And when you’re the Enterprise cloud and file-sharing and collaboration outfit Box, you turn that advantage into something your far-flung customers can take advantage of.

When file are big — and in business, they always are — and you need to share something, uploads can be a time-consuming pain in the neck. So Box today launched a network of what it calls Box Accelerators. A network of servers distributed around the world, they serve as outposts for Box’s primary data centers. Box customers around the world will be able to upload to these Accelerators, and thus speed things up, say CEO Aaron Levie. In some cases, Box is bringing to bear its relationship with Amazon Web Services, and that company’s global footprint.

“We’re making a big push on international expansion,” Levie told me in a conversation at Box’s Los Altos, Calif., headquarters last week. Over the summer, the company opened a new office in London, and announced plans to hire 100 people there, in order to double down on opportunities it sees in Europe.

Media companies, health-care companies, and companies and institutions engaged in scientific research often have to move large, cumbersome files around in order to make them available for collaboration with colleagues. The primary factor in slowing down that process is distance. For all the vaunted rhetoric of how the Internet makes the world a smaller place, when it comes to moving gigabytes or more at a time, the one thing standing in your way is the distance between you and the server you’re uploading to.

The network of Accelerators are intended to shorten that distance. Box customers will get a choice of servers closest to them, and those servers in turn will have an easier time of communicating with Box’s main servers at its network of data centers, including a newish-one in Las Vegas, and another two in California.

The service is going live in nine different regions around the world on every continent except Africa, and is available free of charge for existing Box customers. And while today the network is specified only for uploads, it will in time enhance the speed of downloads as well, Levie told me. And it will also be addressable by Box’s API, meaning that if you’re building an application that takes advantage of Box’s network, the accelerators will be available for use.

I took advantage of a few minutes with Levie to ask him about his reaction to last week’s disclosure by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he’s close to announcing a service called Chatterbox that will essentially compete with Box. Benioff will likely talk in detail about Chatterbox in his keynote address at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference on Wednesday. Expect collaboration and file-sharing to become part of Salesforce’s Chatter social platform soon.

Levie said he’s known about Salesforce’s intentions in this area for about four months to six months. “We’ve known about it, frankly they kind of have to do it,” he said. “If you think about Chatter, and Jive, Yammer, that kind of social world, it necessarily has to connect up to your content. And Salesforce is trying to carve out the space that Chatter can play in. It’s not enough to be a standalone social platform. Salesforce has basically realized that Chatter has to be able to solve more problems for the enterprise before they can have a serious conversation with a CIO.”

Content that companies share both internally and with partners, vendors, suppliers and customers has to be enhanced with social collaboration features. This is the very essence of companies like Jive and Yammer, and Salesforce’s product in this area known as Chatter. “Salesforce will take what it has as a social platform and add content to it,” Levie said. “What we’re doing is more like the inverse. We have a content platform, and we bring social aspects to it, where relevant. We work with all of the social platforms out there, and we’re going to be building more collaborative capabilities into Box.”

You might think this would be a tad awkward, given the fact that Salesforce is an investor in Box, and is even said to have offered to acquire Box last year, for north of $500 million.

Not at all, Levie says. “There are lots of precedents for companies being both investors, partners and competitors.” To me, it sounds like a diplomatic way of saying “game on.”

Internet stocks got a much needed boost today, after the market rose to its highest levels in three months on solid earnings reports and less worry about the economic disaster in Europe.

The downhill-sliding of Facebook stopped again today, with a 3.9 percent rise to close at $21.92. While still off more than 42 percent since its May IPO, the social networking giant got itself back on the prettier side of $20.

Content portal AOL also had a 3.7 percent gain, likely due to news of a patent dispute settlement, to close at $33.83. It is up an impressive 124 percent for the year.

LinkedIn, one of the few Class of Web 2.0 winners, rose 2.8 percent to $111.55; the business network is up 77 percent for the year.

Better still: Zynga, which has been suffering badly of late, was up about 8.1 percent to close at $2.94 (the online gaming company is still down 69 percent year to date). The same was true of Groupon, another stock loser of late, with its shares rising more than 10 percent to $7.25, which is still down 65 percent for the year.

Also up strongly was recommendations site Yelp, which gained 8.7 percent to $25.43.

Also up smartly: Travel site Kayak, up 4.2 percent to $32.68; video service Brightcove, up almost 6 percent to $14.74; reservation site OpenTable, up 1.9 percent to $40.29; music streaming service Pandora, up 2.5 percent to $9.79; and collaboration software company Jive, up just over 2 percent to $19.11.

In contrast, Internet giant Yahoo gained less than a half of a percent in today’s trading, though it did finally remain above the $16 price barrier to close at $16.04. It is down a little more than a half of a percent for the year, despite the recent splashy hiring of new CEO Marissa Mayer.

Google, too, saw only a quarter percent rise, to $642.82. The search giant is also down a half of a percent for the year.

If you invested some of your money in the series of big, splashy IPOs that Silicon Valley has largely funded and churned out over the last year, you might be a little irritated.

Even irked. Possibly quite out of sorts.

And you would have good reason if you looked at the performance of many of the freshmen companies that have come out since early last summer.

That’s because of all of them, only three — business network LinkedIn, enterprise software start-up Jive and the recently debuted travel site Kayak — are your friends, up 9.8 percent since its May 27, 2011, debut; 26 percent since a December 15, 2011, opening; and about six percent since an IPO last week, respectively. In addition, video services company Brightcove is up a small 2.7 percent since its February 21, 2012, IPO.

Not so much for the other four, which have been much rockier, in order of their public offerings: music streaming site Pandora, down 29.6 percent since its June 24, 2011, IPO; Groupon, down 72.3 percent since the daily deals site’s November 7, 2011, IPO; Zynga, down 46.6 percent since its December 19, 2011, IPO; and Facebook, down almost 23 percent since its May 18, 2012, IPO.

But the stock weakness — as social networking giant Facebook preps to release its first earnings report as a public company tomorrow, after Zynga’s disastrous Q2 results from its online gaming business earlier today — does not seem to have stopped the frothy valuations for private start-ups from being even more foamy.

Along with a $2.6 billion new mega venture fund from New Enterprise Associates, comes a Wall Street Journal report that online storage company Box is raising a new round at a $1.2 billion valuation and hopes to IPO at a $2 billion to $3 billion one next year; and online payments start-up Square is looking at a $3.25 billion-valued round, according to the New York Times, which is 13.5 times higher than just two years ago.

Caveat: While there have been some good returns to private investors in the M&A space of late, such as social enterprise network Yammer’s recent $1.2 billion sale to Microsoft, not everyone is going to get such deals.

And definitely not public investors for whom hope either springs eternal — or just springs a leak.

That’s an old Wall Street saying that sums up with surprising accuracy the behavior of investors in the presence of uncertain rumors in the marketplace. The rumor in this case is the intention of the software giant Microsoft to acquire the enterprise social collaboration player Yammer for a price said to be in the neighborhood of $1 billion or slightly higher.

It is, as I argued in the wee hours of this morning, a plausible, if not a believable, rumor.

The spillover effect on rival Jive Software has been pronounced. Its shares rose today by $1.60, or more than 9 percent, to $18.33 a share, and has pushed its market valuation to north of $1.1 billion. Though even at that level, Jive is trading at a 35 percent discount to its 52-week high. It held its IPO late last year.

Naturally, there’s some hope among Jive shareholders that if Yammer ends up in the hands of Microsoft, someone else — perhaps Oracle or SAP — might step in and take out Jive at a healthy premium. Oracle has been making moves in the social space, buying Collective Intellect and Vitrue.

At least there’s some basis for the speculation. A deal for one company in a space often leads to a deal for another. We saw this pattern clearly late last year and early this year with a spate of deals for cloud-based HR software companies. The first to go was SuccessFactors last December, which SAP acquired for $3.4 billion. Next was Taleo, which Oracle scooped up for $1.9 billion in February. Meanwhile, Workday, the cloud-based HR play started by two former PeopleSoft execs, is on its way to a fall IPO. The fall of one domino leads to another.

No one authorized to speak for Yammer is talking about this. I will say that a lunch meeting I had scheduled on Tuesday in New York with Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni was suddenly canceled because of what I was told was a “personal emergency.” It could be coincidence, but then again it might not be.

Another bit of color I’ve heard — and again it may not mean anything — is that Yammer CEO David Sacks has invitations out for a big 40th-birthday bash in Southern California this weekend, at which rapper Snoop Dogg is expected to perform. Whether or not Sacks will be celebrating the sale of his company is still uncertain, but there’s a lot about the speculative story in Bloomberg — which cites two people familiar with the talks — that makes sense.

Outwardly, Yammer has looked to be the most promising of the social enterprise software players that are not named Jive. In February, it raised $85 million in a fifth round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, at an implied valuation of about $1 billion. Meritech Capital Partners, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group and Khosla Ventures also participated in that round. Prior investors include Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners, and the angel investors are Bill Lee, Max Levchin and the football great Ronnie Lott.

That round of funding came on the heels of the late-2011 IPO of rival Jive, whose market capitalization as of Wednesday’s close was $1.03 billion. Lots of people got rich in that offering, especially founders Bill Lynch and Matthew Tucker, and CEO Tony Zingale.

Jive had followed a fairly specific path to going public, which Yammer could have followed, but hasn’t. For example: Before raising a $30 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins in the summer of 2010, Jive had tapped Zingale, the veteran CEO of Mercury Interactive, who saw that company through its $4.5 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard.

Later, in early 2011, Jive added directors with public company experience to its board; then it set about making some important acquisitions, among them Proximal Labs, an “acqhire” deal; and then OfficSync, a deal that gave it crucial plug-in technology for Microsoft Office.

Yammer has done nothing like this, with one exception: Its April acquisition of the British start-up OneDrum looked an awful lot like Jive’s acquisition of OfficSync. Otherwise, there have been none of the classic pre-IPO signals from Yammer: No high-profile additions to the board, no more acquisitions, no chatter about bankers competing to lead it through the S1 filing and road-show process. When asked about his interest in doing an IPO, Sacks would, in conversations with me, tend to simply avoid the subject. A billion-dollar exit now would seem mighty attractive to Sacks and Yammer’s investors, rather than the uncertainty of an IPO in a shaky market, coupled with a head-to-head-to-head competitive slugfest with Jive and Salesforce.

Then there’s the simple matter of business challenges. Yammer is, by all accounts and its own publicly disclosed stats, having trouble converting its free users to paid status. It is quick to brag about its four million corporate users, but they’re fuzzy numbers. Many start using the service for free, experiment with it, but never turn out to be regular, daily users. Fewer still ever convert to paid status. Yammer has said in the past that its conversion rate is about 20 percent, which works out to about 800,000 paid seats. Getting companies to pony up has proven difficult. Jive doesn’t disclose the total number of seats, but it does disclose how many companies are customers: 676 as of March 31, all of them paying subscribers.

If Microsoft proves to be the buyer, then it would give the Windows and Office giant a key piece of technology to offer its enterprise customers. One big argument for the existence of the social enterprise software business is to attack Microsoft’s outdated collaboration software, SharePoint.

The players are many: Aside from Jive and Yammer, there’s Salesforce.com’s Chatter service, which tends to be strong in sales departments where the mainline CRM service is already in use. Other players include Socialcast, owned by VMware; Moxie Software and Atlassian’s HipChat are others.

Once Microsoft gets its hands on it, two things will be true: Yammer, which is generally seen as still being buggy and in need of a lot of smoothing out of its rougher edges, will need some serious investment. The problem is that, even at a $1 billion valuation, Yammer is small enough that it will disappear inside Microsoft.

The other is that the freemium business model will have to go away. With the possible exception of Skype, it’s just not in Microsoft’s DNA to offer an enterprise product for free and leave it to the users to upgrade to the paid version when it suits them. When the rubber meets the road, many customers may dump Yammer in favor of something else. Those who are serious and willing to pay will consider Jive, which would probably capitalize on the opportunity by offering special deals to customers who switch. Those who demand free will switch to something they can still get for free.

We’ll see if this deal materializes. Bloomberg said a deal could be announced as early as today.

This creates curious opportunities for fun. When Twilio was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As recounted by VentureBeat, when Lawson called, he heard automated voice messages asking him to press 1 for $5 million, 2 for $10 million and 3 for $15 million.

Hijinks like this say a lot about the culture that surrounds Twilio, but it’s not well known outside the developer community. Addressing that will be job one for Lynda Smith, its new chief marketing officer, who joined the company on April 23.

Smith is joining Twilio from Jive, the social enterprise software concern, where she was senior vice president of marketing until last fall. As CMO, she’ll be responsible for Twilio’s marketing strategy around the world.

“I think the Twilio brand is huge among developers because it gives that community a chance to play with something they haven’t had before,” Smith told me. “But it’s also getting a lot of traction within the telephony industry. … Voice and messaging are still a big part of the worlds that we live in, but they’ve been difficult to bring into new-world software applications because it’s still tied to some old-world things like hardware and protocols.” First priority, she says, is making sure that people outside the developer world know what Twilio is and what they can do with it.

Before Jive, Smith held a number executive slots at Genpact, Nuance, Genesys and Lockheed Martin. She’s a graduate of Simpson College, and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. She’s also on the faculty at Stanford University, where she lectures on global entrepreneurial marketing.

Twilio is definitely on the move: It landed $17 million in that C round late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million. It also just announced its second conference in San Francisco, in October. Time to get serious about marketing.

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.

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

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.

The move is the latest by Yammer to integrate with other third-party software. Last year, Yammer raised eyebrows a bit by integrating Salesforce.com’s competing Chatter social enterprise service into its own software. Later, it integrated Box.net and a batch of other services, like Microsoft SharePoint and NetSuite.

Yammer didn’t work directly with SAP on the integration but instead turned to an SAP developer called Freeborders to build a plugin that companies using SAP can install into Yammer. They call it the Yammer SAP Connector.

SAP’s main business is around Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP software, which companies use to plan and operate their business. In SAP’s case, ERP is run as old-school, on-premise software rather than in the cloud as a software-as-service approach. SAP rival NetSuite sells its ERP software in the cloud.

The big deal about social enterprise software — which includes not only Yammer, but the recently IPOed Jive Software, Salesforce’s Chatter, and VMware’s Socialcast — is that collaboration across a department, a division, an entire company, or between a company and outside partners can be as easy as the social experience on Facebook or Twitter. It’s a big craze in enterprise software circles right now, spurred in part by overflowing and inefficient email in-boxes, and the Facebook generation entering the workforce.

I talked with Yammer CEO David Sacks about this yesterday, and he told me that one important aspect of the plugin is that it adds a “follow” button to SAP. So, if you’re an SAP user inside a particular company, you can follow a piece of data or a project or an event in SAP as readily as making a friend in Facebook.

The Connector plugin sends events from SAP to the Yammer ticker, which looks suspiciously like a Facebook activity stream. If something important to you happens in SAP, you’ll see it in Yammer first, and a link will take you directly to the SAP record.

SAP isn’t the only product being integrated into Yammer today. Yammer added five others: GageIn, a business content aggregation platform; Kindling, which bills itself as an ideation company; Moreover Technologies, a media monitoring concern; Planview, a portfolio management product; and SparqLight, which is used to manage workflow in the cloud.

By my count, that makes 15 different services that work with Yammer. The next logical one, on my scorecard, is Oracle. I asked Sacks about that. “It’s definitely on the road map,” he said. Yammer’s strategy is essentially to be a “social Switzerland” that works with all the important business software, whether it runs in the cloud or on-premise. “We’re not going to be beholden to any one technology,” Sacks told me. “We want to be the social layer that lays on top of all the important enterprise applications.”

Whatever Yammer is doing, it appears to be working. It finished 2011 with more than four million end users at 200,000 companies, and late last year it lured a key senior executive away from Salesforce. It is also said to be close to landing a $50 million investment, at an implied valuation variously reported to be between $500 million and $1 billion.

Sacks had nothing to say on the subject of raising money. Last year, Yammer raised $17 million from Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital Partnership; in 2010, it raised two rounds, a $25 million Series C led by US Venture Partners, and a $10 million B round led by Emergence Capital. But something tells me this is going to be a big year for Yammer.

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.

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.

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