Jive Software Prices IPO At $12 Per Share
Enterprise social networking company Jive Software has priced its IPO at $12 per share, according to the WSJ. — Jive sold 13.4 million shares, up from previous plans to sell 11,700,470 shares priced between $8 and $10 per share. The total offering is $160.8 million.
Context & Ripple Effects
Jive's road to this pricing started with its S-1 filing in August 2011, which disclosed an awkward top line: revenue of $16.9M in 2008 grew to $46.3M in 2009, then fell to $34.0M in 2010. That dip made the offering a live test of whether investors would pay up for enterprise social networking despite decelerating financials.
The answer arrived over five days: Bloomberg reported on December 7 that the IPO got a boost following billion-dollar cloud-computing deals, and Jive responded by upsizing the deal from 11.7 million shares to 13.4 million and pricing at $12 — well above the original $8-$10 range — for a $160.8 million total offering.
First-order effects
- Jive banks $160.8 million in primary capital at a valuation set by public-market demand rather than private marks, giving it a war chest to fund sales expansion while its revenue trajectory recovers.
- Pricing above range converts the 2010 revenue decline from a disqualifier into a footnote — underwriters found enough institutional demand to clear a deal the August filing framed cautiously.
Second-order effects
- As a listed company, Jive must now report quarterly against a shrinking-then-recovering revenue base, and every miss will be read as a verdict on the enterprise social networking category itself, not just one vendor.
- Rival collaboration vendors lose the argument that the market cannot fund a standalone social-software player; a capitalized Jive raises the cost of competing for enterprise deals on both product breadth and sales headcount.
Third-order effects
- If the above-range pricing holds in aftermarket trading, expect other enterprise-collaboration companies to accelerate their own S-1 filings, turning social software from a feature inside larger suites into a separately capitalized public category.
- The structural question the listing settles over time is whether standalone social platforms can sustain independent scale or whether they get absorbed into broader suites — the $160.8 million raise buys Jive years to prove the former.
The trend: Enterprise social networking is crossing from venture-backed niche to public-market category, with Jive's above-range pricing serving as the first real price discovery for the space.