Jive Software, the one-time darling of the Portland technology scene, has filed for a $100 million initial public offering. Now based in Palo Alto, California, the company still has deep connections to the Pacific Northwest, including Portland where it still operates a large operation of sales, marketing and product development.
Jive, a maker of online tools that help workers collaborate on projects, also earlier this year purchased Seattle-based OffiSync. At the time, the terms of the deal were not disclosed. But today’s IPO filing indicates that Jive paid $23.3 million for the company, which has developed technologies that connect workers in the Microsoft environment.
In fact, Jive not only works in conjunction with Microsoft, but views the Redmond software giant as a potential rival. It notes in the filing:
“We currently compete with large well-established multi-solution enterprise software vendors, stand-alone enterprise software application providers, and smaller software application vendors. Our primary competition currently comes from large well-established enterprise software vendors such as Microsoft Corporation and IBM Corporation, both of which are significantly larger than we are, have greater name recognition, larger customer bases, much longer operating histories, significantly greater financial, technical, sales, marketing and other resources, and are able to provide comprehensive business solutions that are broader in scope than the solution we offer.”
Jive’s IPO filing is one of many that comes in the technology industry, and could signal that investors are still bullish on the sector heading into the Labor Day weekend holiday.
