Enterprise collaboration company Jive Software has acquired Seattle-based OffiSync, a start-up that enables web-based collaboration on Microsoft Office products.
The deal will give Jive the ability to offer enterprises an easy way to make Microsoft Word and Outlook instantly social and tightly integrated with Jive. It could be a major move in this space.
Terms were not disclosed but the deal was valued at $25 to $30 million according to Israel-based The Marker.
Jive already has 3,000 customers and more than 15 million users. But this will provide an on-ramp for a whole new set of Jive customers that may have been hesitant to sign up because they did not want to leave Microsoft Office to collaborate. Now they don’t have to.
Jive acquired data and recommendation start-up Proximal Labs in February. Then in March Jive added high-profile board members from McAfee, Intel, Facebook and Google. But this OffiSync acquisition may end up being bigger than either of those moves.
Previous to this, if people were collaborating on a Word document, they had do the document editing and collaboration parts separately. But there was no real way to collaborate within the document itself. (I’m leaving aside Word’s markup feature, since that doesn’t integrate with other collaboration software.)
With OffiSync, people can upload a Word or PowerPoint file into the browser in Jive, then comment on it, discuss it and collaborate with others in the Jive environment. Or they can just open Word or PowerPoint as they normally do. With the OffiSync (and now Jive) plug-in, they will see a pane inside Word to do the same things--add comments, tag content, invite others to collaborate, and see other people’s edits in real-time as they happen.
The comments and actions are all synced from Word back to Jive so that people who are working only in Jive can see the same comments. “It’s one consistent experience,” says Tony Zingale, CEO of Jive.
OffiSync is headed by co-founder and CEO Oudi Antebi. He’s a former Microsoft executive who worked on Sharepoint and has a deep background in Microsoft Office. As part of the acquisition, Antebi is moving to Jive’s Palo Alto’s offices and OffiSync’s Israel office will become Jive’s Israel office.
“The integration is very deep,” Antebi says. “You can see edits as they happen. This is social document collaboration as opposed to old school document management where you check in and check out a document and come back two hours later and wait for it. That’s the '90s.”
Founded in early 2010, OffiSync’s first product enabled people to collaborate on Office documents in real time. That was the only product OffiSync sold directly. The rest of its products it sold as white-label services. Jive has been working with OffiSync for about a year—OffiSync already has an existing integration with Jive.
Antebi says he has met or worked with about 27 companies in the enterprise collaboration space and felt Jive was the best.
"Many do technology and get excited about widgets and feeds and get overhyped about this,” Antebi says. “Jive was the one company that was actually able to understand the enterprise and the importance of integrating with the desktop. It’s not as cool as doing pretty widgets and websites. It comes from understanding the technology.”
Another OffiSync integration for email--which Jive will be releasing this year in Q3--through Microsoft Outlook gives a variety of context and information about people when you receive an email. The tool gives information about what that person is doing on Jive, including projects and discussions they’re having on Jive, areas of expertise, and other emails the person has sent you.
“You don’t have to change your behavior,” Zingale says. “If you spend seven hours a day in Outlook you don't have to compromise.”
There are a number of email start-ups that help people organize their email, such as Xobni, Xoopit, (which was acquired) and Rapportive. But Zingale says this is different because it’s much more tightly integrated with Jive.
How will this acquisition affect Jive, which is widely expected to be considering filing for an IPO? Zingale would not discuss any IPO thoughts but said the move opens up a much bigger market for the company. Other competitors, including Yammer and Salesforce's Chatter, I'd add, will have to think about how this affects their offerings.
“It just accelerates everything,” Zingale says. “A whole group of people are still here in the Microsoft world and are not leaving any time soon, nor should they. Now we can work with both of these groups and be a kind of bridge. Our sales guys are rabid and can’t wait to take our new platform … and go attack the enterprise.”
Watch: Forbes' Kym McNicholas Interview Jive CEO Tony Zingale:
[forbesvid id="fvn/cio/jive-ceo-on-why-social-is-not-fad-at-work" showid="77"]
