Following through on a plan they first announced last year, the two companies said that Box’s content-sharing capabilities would be integrated with Jive’s software. If your company happens to be a customer of both — not uncommon — content in Box will from now on be easily accessible from within Jive and vice versa.

Yesterday I got Box CEO and D11 speaker Aaron Levie on the phone with Jive CEO Tony Zingale to talk about why they’re pairing up and which competitors they share in common.

Here are some highlights from our conversation.

AllThingsD: So you said last year you were going to team up in this way. What exactly have you done here and why is it important?

Zingale: Back in October we announced our intent to go to market together. It had a lot to do with the complementary nature of our products and the huge shift we were seeing in the marketplace as enterprises retool around collaboration and social and mobile. And being the two market leaders in those areas, it makes sense we would get together and connect our two systems. We think it’s a huge deal between the two companies and can now demonstrate the functionality now that it’s shipping.

Aaron, Box was sort of built from the ground up with working with other companies in mind. And now here you are working a little more closely with one in particular. Is there any other outside company with which Box has so close a relationship?

Levie: This is critical to our strategy. We feel that content needs to extend into all sorts of business applications that you may want to use. As you look at the social enterprise and collaboration space more broadly, Jive is the clear leader. So the deeper that we can combine our products and services, it creates one unified experience for customers. And true to Tony being the master of the enterprise, they are in a very big number of large companies that we’re now starting to serve. This will only accelerate that. At a more meta-level, it represents a bigger trend. Five or 10 years ago you were forced to buy all your technology as a single large stack from an Oracle or an SAP. But now because of collaborations like this, and because of open APIs, you can mix and match the best IT products and services. That will fundamentally change the IT landscape. Startups and disruptors will be highly favored over established players.

One big competitor you share is Salesforce.com. Salesforce has Chatter, which competes with Jive, and it has also announced plans to build a product that it says will compete with Box, though Salesforce is also an investor in Box. Can you unpack that shared dynamic for me?

Zingale: The intent to compete with Jive has existed there for years now. The second thing is that I would riff off what Aaron just said. The Salesforce solution is a stack of their own. If you want to use all the Salesforce apps for sales and marketing and service, go have a nice day. But Chatter has morphed into sort of a front-end user interface for its stack of vertically integrated applications. Box and Jive are both agnostic and we’re both going to integrate with whatever is there and present in the customer’s environment. In our case that includes Salesforce. We add a lot of value on top of the CRM (customer relationship management) app, both inside and outside the enterprise. Their position is very much confined to their three silos. And yes they’re open, but I don’t see many enterprises embracing that as the way to integrate how they get things done. We sit on top of and really don’t any more compete head to head with Chatter as much as we once did.

Levie: I would posit that for Tony and myself, the bigger shared enemy for us is probably Microsoft.

Zingale: Same for us.

Levie: I think that in the land of Microsoft, we are all disruptors collectively. Salesforce included. The big opportunity is the legacy spend on collaboration tools. For those companies moving to the cloud, that is the big opportunity for this kind of service.

Aaron, does Box work as closely with any other company as it is now doing with Jive?

Levie: The only other one where we have this depth of integration is NetSuite. We go pretty deep on the Salesforce CRM. But we certainly look for areas where we have a shared customer base, or where customers want to extend the content from Box into something else.

How much do your customers overlap?

Zingale: As we both disrupt the new wave of enterprise applications, Jive has always attacked the larger companies, the ones with thousands of knowledge workers. The attraction for us is that Box has a huge reach within small companies, but also small groups within large companies like American Express or Fidelity or Procter and Gamble using Box is very interesting to us.

Levie: There probably isn’t an enterprise over 1,000 employees that we talk with that isn’t either on Jive or exploring Jive, mainly because social is the type of product where you want it to go across the entire company and not just be integrated with your sales applications.

As Benioff keynotes go, this one has been described to me as “understated.” Rather than occupy a huge venue like the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, Salesforce is holding this event at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Rather than a three-hour revival meeting, it will be a simpler one-hour address. It’s as though a big-name rock singer known for big stadium concert blowouts has shifted to the coffeehouse circuit.

Expect to hear the words “service” and “mobile” a lot. Salesforce made an announcement overnight about what it calls its Service Cloud. It has been adapted to run natively on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. The idea is that customer service reps or any other customer-facing employee can use a mobile device to help customers get the help they need or buy the stuff they want, regardless of how and when they present themselves.

One feature due later this year is called co-browsing. It allows customer-facing reps to engage in what Salesforce describes as a “shared Web experience,” basically browsing together. That pair of shoes you want but can’t seem to find, or that pair of slacks in your size? Sales or service reps can help you find it, and can see what you see on whatever screen you happen to be using.

A big theme of Salesforce’s assumptions and positioning will be around customer expectations. All of us are so used to having access to everything within seconds; when we’re customers we get impatient when we have to wait for someone else to track down whatever it is we need.

A couple of other new additions to the Service Cloud are aimed at addressing that. Mobile Service Cloud Communities give companies a way to build a single place where customers can get answers, either by way of self-help, other people or via company experts.

Another is an instant chat capability. The example I was given here is a clothing store. Say you’re waiting for an alteration. You check with the store, and the sales rep who takes your call is able to contact the tailor working on it directly, who tells you it will be ready in a few hours and you can pick it up on your way home from work.

What you won’t hear Benioff talking about is how the social enterprise is going to change the world. That message is so 2012, and has more or less played itself out.

But you can’t argue with the performance of Salesforce shares. They’re up by more than 34 percent since hitting a recent low in August. They closed Monday at $163.51. And the company looks on track to deliver its planned four-for-one share split. That, at least, is a message most shareholders can get behind.

Crowdfunder is launching today a section of its site to raise money in support of for-profit enterprises that serve communities. It has an impressive list of partners — among them the X Prize Foundation, Singularity University, TED Fellows, Endeavor Mexico and GOOD — that will curate businesses to raise money from their community.

Crowdfunder CEO Chance Barnett argued that the big difference between his site and existing crowdfunding efforts is that it won’t be campaign-based.

“Crowdfunding 2.0 is about relationships and longer-term engagement put alongside an actual business and management team,” he said in an interview this week. “Other crowdfunding platforms aren’t about businesses; they’re mostly about projects.”

Barnett has been heavily involved in regulatory efforts around the JOBS Act, which is expected to open the doors to equity crowdfunding — where so-called “backers” become actual investors — early next year. He said he expects to support equity crowdfunding for accredited investors starting in February 2013.

Based in Los Angeles, Crowdfunder has a team of 13 and is backed with $600,000 in seed funding.

Now Yammer is not only part of SharePoint, but a part of all the company’s mainstream business apps. At a SharePoint-oriented conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced today that the kind of social features that Yammer provides — and which SharePoint was widely criticized for not having, or at least for not having executed well — are now just part of every business application. For openers, Yammer has been integrated into Office 365 Enterprise and with SharePoint Online.

Also gone from Yammer is the four-tiered pricing model that at once made it so successful and yet ultimately was said to have doomed its long-term viability as a business. Yammer had picked up a lot of its momentum by being free for companies to use indefinitely, but it was supposedly a lot more powerful if you got one of the paid versions. The problem was that the free version was usually good enough, and few cared enough to try the paid version. The result: Converting free customers to paid customers was pretty tough.

Microsoft has sought to fix that by cutting the number of versions to two — one free, called Yammer Basic, that will be the simple, standalone version. On the other, Yammer Enterprise, Microsoft has slashed the price from $15 a user to $3 a user.

It’s all part of a broader “social everywhere” strategy that will in time see social features crop up everywhere you see a Microsoft logo: Office, Outlook, Skype. Everything that happens at the office that involves another person becomes an event that shows up in the social feed.

As Microsoft corporate VP Jeff Teper was quoted in the big announcement today: “We envision a world in which social is woven into the apps you use every day — where people work together using new experiences that combine the power of social with collaboration, email and unified communications.”

If you’ve got a few hours, you can watch the action in today’s keynote here.

There’s another drama playing out ahead of Benioff’s keynote, concerning what he may or may not say about a series of features and services called Chatterbox that Salesforce is launching. Last week, Benioff surprised a lot of people by declaring at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he was gearing up to launch services that would compete with Box, the enterprise cloud file-sharing and collaboration service, and also with Okta, a cloud identity-management service.

Aaron Levie, Box’s CEO, said he had seen the service coming for a few months now, and that it was, in a sense, inevitable. Salesforce’s Chatter social enterprise service would in time need a robust file-sharing capability built into it, anyway.

Since then, I’ve checked in with Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta. His reaction was pretty close to that of Levie’s. He has known that it was coming for awhile, and Salesforce had to do it anyway. “Salesforce is realizing that, with the cloud and a mobile work force, managing the identity layer is a key part of it,” McKinnon told me Monday. “They finally woke up to it. It’s a little unnerving when someone as big as Salesforce gets into your space, but it makes it clear to our customers and partners that this is a big deal we’re working on, so in that sense, it’s a big validation.”

With so many companies adopting cloud services and creating accounts for employees on all of them, McKinnon left Salesforce, where he had headed up its engineering efforts, to start Okta. The service gathers up all those cloud account credentials and passwords and creates a single sign-on for all of them, making them easy to manage. Salesforce.com is one of the 1,351 services it works with. Others include Box, Google Apps, NetSuite, Workday and Microsoft’s Windows Azure.

McKinnon takes some encouragement from the data he sees courtesy of his own service. Offering a service for unified sign-ons makes Okta sort of a barometer for the cloud ecosystem, he says. Chatter, Salesforce’s social service, is more or less central to Salesforce’s efforts to unify its many offerings, and is the company’s answer to services like Jive and Yammer that have sought to make the process of collaborating within a company a little more akin to using Facebook.

Salesforce’s promotion of Chatter helped Jive and Yammer seem more legitimate. “Salesforce put all this money and effort behind Chatter, but it didn’t kill Yammer or Jive, it only accelerated their business,” McKinnon said. Jive IPO’d last year, and Yammer was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion over the summer. “Once Salesforce comes out with its identity management product, I think more people will look at us.”

So, how much of a competitive threat does McKinnon see from Salesforce? Some, but announcements aren’t products. And there’s the rub. Salesforce, McKinnon says, has a habit of making big announcements from the stage at Dreamforce, and then not following up, or at least not following up to the extent that the pronouncements from the keynote stage would seem to imply. “Salesforce is in many ways a marketing-driven company,” he says. “We’ll have to see how they execute. The real proof will be in how they follow up this Dreamforce announcement.”

Skire is privately held and relatively small, so the financial terms aren’t being disclosed. Oracle says it will combine its assets with its existing Oracle Primavera line of products. Primavera was a company devoted to software built for the engineering and construction industries that Oracle acquired in 2008.

It’s another step by Oracle in filling out its software-as-a-service offerings. The big one this year, of course, was Taleo, a SaaS-based human capital management application, which it grabbed for $1.9 billion. The other big one in recent memory was RightNow, which it acquired for $1.4 billion last October.

Oracle has also been buying up companies in the social space — three so far this year, to be exact. Earlier this month, it acquired Involver. That deal came after the acquisitions of Collective Intellect in June and Vitrue in May. Prices on all three were officially undisclosed, though Vitrue was reported to have sold for about $300 million.

IBM acquired a software company called Tririga that overlapped somewhat with Skire in the space of managing real estate.

Skire’s customers include ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical, Qualcomm, Bank of America and Roche.

Rumored for awhile, word of the deal started to leak on Twitter and elsewhere about two weeks ago. Buzz picked up considerably around the same time that Yammer CEO David Sacks held a huge 40th birthday party at a rented mansion in Southern California.

Yammer will become part of the Microsoft Office Division, run by Kurt DelBene, though the Yammer team will continue to report to Sacks. The plan calls for Yammer to stick to its current track of developing its own service, while Microsoft pushes ahead to nudge further adoption alongside SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.

Initial speculation about the deal pushed shares of Jive, Yammer’s primary rival, up considerably. Following the standard “buy on the rumor, sell on the news” pattern, now that the rumor has become news, shareholders are bailing out and Jive shares are down about 5 percent to $19.45 as I write this.

Launched in 2008, Yammer has been the most promising of the social enterprise companies not named Jive. Last February, it raised a fifth round of funding — $85 million led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, at an implied valuation of about $1 billion $600 million.

Update: I’ve just heard from someone familiar with the February funding round that Yammer was valued at $600 million, or about half of today’s purchase price. No wonder Yammer’s employees were so giddy they couldn’t contain themselves at The Creamery.

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; the angel investors are Bill Lee, Max Levchin and football great Ronnie Lott.

Coming as it did on the heels of Jive’s late 2011 IPO, conventional wisdom suggested that Yammer would follow and go for an IPO of its own.

But after that funding round, Yammer followed none of the usual steps associated with a pre-IPO company: While Sacks is a former PayPal executive, there was no effort at Yammer to recruit additional directors with public company experience.

The first few paragraphs of the official announcement are below. There was one acquisition — the British software firm OneDrum — but it was pretty small. There was no chatter about bankers or an S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Lacking all of that, it was pretty clear that a buyout was the more likely scenario.

Yammer can’t have ended up in better hands: A cash-rich owner with time on its hands. For all its vaunted popularity among large companies — you can’t have a conversation about it without running into its well-worn stat that it has five million users at 85 percent of the Fortune 500 — Yammer has a famously difficult time converting its free users to paid users. More often than not, a handful of employees will adopt it, with varying levels of success in integrating it into their workflow. Many just experiment with it and then never take to it.

Those who do like it usually find that the free version is sufficient. By Yammer’s own admission, its conversion rate is about 20 percent. That means that, of those five million users, a mere one million are paid users.

Jive, on the other hand, lets companies try its services out free for 30 days, then they have to start paying. While it doesn’t disclose the total number of individual users, it has 676 companies using its service and software, all of them paid.

Microsoft to Acquire Yammer
June 25, 2012
Microsoft extends cloud services with best-in-class enterprise social networking.

Here’s the official announcement:

REDMOND, Wash., and SAN FRANCISCO — June 25, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. and Yammer Inc. today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Yammer, a leading provider of enterprise social networks, for $1.2 billion in cash. Yammer will join the Microsoft Office Division, led by division President Kurt DelBene, and the team will continue to report to current CEO David Sacks.

“The acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft. “Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services.”

Launched in 2008, Yammer now has more than 5 million corporate users, including employees at 85 percent of the Fortune 500. The service allows employees to join a secure, private social network for free and then makes it easy for companies to convert a grassroots movement into companywide strategic initiative.

Yammer will continue to develop its standalone service and maintain its commitment to simplicity, innovation and cross-platform experiences. Moving forward, Microsoft plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.

“When we started Yammer four years ago, we set out to do something big,” Sacks said. “We had a vision for how social networking could change the way we work. Joining Microsoft will accelerate that vision and give us access to the technologies, expertise and resources we’ll need to scale and innovate.”

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.

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.

iStockphoto.com/pablohart

Radian6 is the Canadian social analytics outfit for which Salesforce paid $326 million in March of 2011. Since then it has turned out to be one of the most important deals that CEO Marc Benioff has done since starting the company. Radian6 offers a cloud-based service to companies to monitor in real time what people are saying about them and their products on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, as well as on blogs and Web forums.

It also bears repeating that this deal with Twitter is taking place against the backdrop of the $689 million acquisition by Salesforce of Buddy Media about two weeks ago.

Radian6 customers will get access to Twitter’s direct feed of Tweets, which is quickly becoming a key source of brand and business intelligence. When you want to know what people think about your brand, Twitter is the place to find out, because it and Facebook are where consumers go to say what’s on their minds, ask questions and so on.

The announcement is sort of sketchy on one key point: Financial terms. There’s no way that access to the “firehose” comes for free, but there’s no mention of what Salesforce did or didn’t pay. Twitter, as a privately held company, wouldn’t have to disclose it. And for Salesforce, the amount would only have to be disclosed if it were material, which apparently it’s not. And if Twitter got no financial consideration, then there must be some other benefit it’s getting. Perhaps now that it’s got an advertising strategy there’s some benefit in allowing advertisers easy access to the stream in order to do the analysis needed to plan future campaigns and figure out if their money is being spent well. We’ll see.

Another thing that’s missing? The word “exclusive.” Will other companies be able to get the same level of access that Salesforce enjoys? Again, we’ll see.

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

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.

Excluding charges for compensation and other items, Salesforce reported earnings of 34 cents on sales of $584 million, up 36 percent. The problem was the quarter’s billings — the sum of revenue plus the change in deferred revenue was $567 million; 3 percent, or nearly $20 million, off the consensus.

But never fear, says CEO Marc Benioff. The company is well on its way to breaking the $2.3 billion revenue barrier, and it would be the first cloud software company to do so. The company also said it expects fourth-quarter sales in the range of $620 million to $624 million, which would be ahead of the consensus of $610 million. And it said that its expects earnings of 39 to 40 cents, which is lower than analysts had expected by a penny. One the brighter side, guidance for the 2013 fiscal year, which starts in February, was ahead of the consensus by 4 percent.

The larger question is the size of the cloud opportunity, for which Benioff is the ultimate salesman, spokesman and advocate. As successful as Salesforce has been in disrupting the traditional software model and giving companies like Oracle and SAP the occasional headache, what remains unclear is how much new services like Chatter.com — the social enterprise and collaboration features that Benioff can’t seem to stop talking about — are contributing to the top line, and whether they will justify the cost to build them.

Then there’s the valuation. Salesforce finished the regular session trading at a valuation of 615 times its trailing earnings, and it has been in sky-high territory for some time. Last month, Salesforce stock nose-dived after comments from hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson on CNBC that Salesforce might be due for a 75 percent drop, a la Netflix. Salesforce shares fell nearly 5 percent that day, to $123.

As I write these words, it’s trading six dollars lower than that, at $117. Tough day.

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.

One of the social enterprise companies getting a fair amount of buzz is Yammer. Initially known as a “Twitter for work,” it’s now transforming itself into something of a catchall for updates generated by numerous workplace applications.

Today, Yammer will announce that it will work with another application, and it’s a big one: Salesforce.com. The folks at Yammer used Force.com — Salesforce’s development platform — and Yammer’s own API to grab activity stream data from within Salesforce. Sales leads, deals, marketing campaigns and all sorts of other activity that gets entered into Salesforce.com become objects that can appear directly within a Yammer stream, which is essentially as easy to keep track of and interact with as a Facebook stream.

In fact, a Facebook stream is exactly what Yammer CEO David Sacks compares it to. “A few months ago we released an activity stream API that lets any application push activity stories into Yammer, the same way that Zynga can push items like the latest Mafia Wars score into your Facebook stream,” he says.

Yammer did the integration with help from Appirio, a cloud apps developer that gets tapped to do a lot of third-party integration work.

But doesn’t Salesforce already have its own social software? Why, yes it does. Its Chatter.com service launched to much fanfare with a pair of expensive TV ads that aired during the Super Bowl, which in turn kicked off a bit of a skirmish within Google search results that Yammer took part in.

It’s not as if Yammer were partnering with Salesforce here. Sacks says that Yammer just, well, did it. “The nice thing about the open API world that we live in is that you don’t necessarily have to seek permission to use these APIs.”

The wider point of Yammer, Sacks says, is to pull social data not just from one application, but from many. Not everyone in a company is going to be using Salesforce.com in the first place. The sales department might, and senior management might, but it’s of little use to, say, the human resources department or the accounting department. So Yammer talks to other applications, too. Case in point: Netsuite. Yammer announced an integration with that cloud-based business management suite of applications in May. It also works with Microsoft’s SharePoint and Active Directory.

And there will be more, Sacks says. “We’re seeing a trend with all these various line-of-business applications to build their own social networks into what they do,” he says. “And we’re already seeing customers and potential customers complaining about this, because they wind up with a dozen different social networks in their company and that defeats the whole purpose.” Yammer, he says, will be the middleman application that brings all those social streams into one place for everyone in a company. The comparison to Facebook is no accident: Yammer’s technology is based on Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.

So what happened to Chatter? Well, ask Salesforce and you’ll see some impressive stats and customer wins. Salesforce says that Chatter is used by 100,000 companies, among them Dell, Qualcomm and Lenovo.

But Yammer’s got 100,000 customers of its own, boasts three million corporate end users, and is adding them at a rate of about 200,000 a month. And there are some pretty impressive names among them, including chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, LG Electronics, eBay and Thomson Reuters. And it got those without having to spend tens of millions on Super Bowl ads. A half-million of those customers are using the paid version of Yammer.

It’s a fast-moving business and there are numerous players. Another big one to watch is Jive Software, which was said last week to have hired bankers for a pending IPO, and which is being valued at $1 billion.

No wonder Yammer has done so well in raising funding. It has brought in a combined $40 million, which was topped off last November by a $25 million round led by US Venture Partners, with Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures and the Founders Fund also participating. Ron Conway’s SV Angel was an early investor as well.

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?