digibyte - Jive to be acquired by private equity firm ESW Capital for $462m

Jive Software

, an enterprise collaboration vendor, has announced that it is to be acquired by private equity firm ESW Capital, through its affiliate Wave Systems, for a deal that is being valued at $462 million.

The news comes on the eve of Jive’s annual user event in Las Vegas, where CEO Elisa Steele will be providing an update on the company’s latest turnaround strategy - which has an increased focus on cloud, mobile, an improved UX, and places the Jive contextual collaboration hub at the core.

Since taking up the position of CEO in February 2015, Steele has been working hard to take on the competition in the crowded collaboration market and has managed to turn the company’s losses into profit in the most recent quarter.

The deal represents a premium of 20% to the average Jive closing stock during the three months ending April 28 2017 and was unanimously approved by the board of directors. Completion of the acquisition is subject to the customary closing conditions.

Elisa Steele, CEO of Jive, said:

As the leader of the enterprise collaboration category, Jive has pushed the boundaries in how people work together for the past 16 years. It's this focus and vision that has enabled us to deliver industry-leading product innovation, attract a top-notch customer base with recognized global brands and achieve record earnings and profitability in the last announced quarter.

With Jive and Aurea coming together, we can deliver the superior end-to-end employee and customer experience companies require in today's digital landscape.

Jive will become part of the Aurea family of companies, which claim to provide the technology platform that “enables companies to build, execute, monitor and optimize the end-to-end customer journey”.

Whilst the deal represents a premium on Jive’s average stock price over the past three months, and will likely be perceived to be a good deal for shareholders, it’s worth noting that Jive’s share price stood at $27 in 2012.

Since then the collaboration market has become particularly crowded, with likes of Yammer, Chatter and Slack gaining traction, as well as many cloud vendors building in collaboration features into their broader offering.

However, Jive prides itself on its capability to connect both internal and external collaboration to a central hub that provides context to its users.

Scott Brighton, CEO of Aurea, said:

Jive, in combination with Aurea, enables us to bring customer experience and employee and customer engagement together. We look forward to helping Jive clients get the maximum value out of their investment with Jive.

Everything we do is driven by our singular core value of client success.

My take

The announcement makes for an interesting week here at Jive World in Las Vegas. We will be talking to customers, as well as CEO Elisa Steele, about the news - see keep an eye on diginomica in the coming days for deeper analysis.