Jive’s Stock Languishes; Is Cisco Going To Acquire Them?

According to an IDC report the global enterprise social software market grew from $968 million in 2012 to $1.24 billion in 2013. The IDC report also found that IBM remained the market leader in the segment with more than 75% of the Fortune 100 companies adopting their solutions. Another IDC report had pegged the enterprise social software market to grow 22% annually over the period 2012 to 2017 to $2.7 billion.

Jive’s Financials
Meanwhile, the younger player in the market, Jive (Nasdaq: JIVE) is also delivering strong results. Jive’s Q1 revenues grew 21% over the year to $41 million, managing to exceed market expectations of $40.58 million. Loss per share of $0.09 was also better than the Street’s projected loss of $0.12 per share.

By segment, product revenues grew 21% over the year to $37.4 million. Professional Services revenues grew 15% to $3.7 million. By geography, revenues from the US grew 20% over the year to $31.2 million and international revenues grew 24% to $9.8 million.

Jive continued to invest in Sales and Marketing efforts. During the quarter, sales expenses increased 25% to $23.5 million.

For the current quarter, Jive projected revenues of $41.5 million-$42.5 million with a loss of $0.10-$0.12 per share. They expect to end the year with revenues of $171 million-$176 million and a net loss of $0.38-$0.45 per share.  The market was projecting current quarter revenues at $41.93 million with a loss of $0.11 per share.

Jive’s Expanding Market Reach
Jive’s customer base has been gradually expanding and they added 60 customers during the year to end with 890 customers. They added names like FireEye, Globe Telecom, Kimberly Clark, and Verizon to name a few. As part of their mobile initiatives, Jive also introduced a new iPad app for Producteev. The app will complement their existing apps for MacOS, iPhone, and Android devices and will provide a deeper integration with Microsoft Outlook.

But the biggest news during the recent months was the announcement of their strategic partnership with Cisco. As part of this agreement, Jive’s enterprise collaboration platform will be integrated with Cisco’s real time communication technologies including WebEx and Jabber.

The integration will help in delivering a complete communication and collaboration offering to organizations that will enable a seamless experience for employees, customers and partners. Through the tie-up, Cisco and its reseller network will resell Jive’s solutions as part of Cisco’s collaboration suite. The two companies will also deliver joint go-to-market and product engineering initiatives to help increase market adoption for their services. Jive will also benefit from the global presence that a brand like Cisco carries.

Despite the news, the market has not been very kind to Jive. Their stock is trading at $7.66 with a market capitalization of $538.9 million. It touched a 52-week high of $18.48 in July last year and was trading at a 52-week low of $6.75 earlier this month.

Is Cisco getting ready to acquire Jive?