Jive Software CEO Elisa Steele
Jive Software CEO Elisa Steele
Jive Software, one of the bigger enterprise-collaboration software providers of the pre-Slack era, has been sold to a private equity group six years after going public.

The company announced Monday morning that it was acquired by ESW Capital for $462 million, and Jive will wind up becoming part of Aurea. Aurea operates several different enterprise software businesses under its umbrella.

Jive enjoyed its greatest success in Portland, and at one point was considered the fastest-rising star in the Portland tech scene. But the company decamped for California leading up to its 2011 IPO, although its largest office remains in downtown Portland, according to the Oregonian.

While Jive’s collaboration software was hot in an era that also saw Yammer sold to Microsoft for $1 billion, which caused investors to value it around $900 million on its first day of public trading, modern products like Slack are currently the darlings of this software market. Microsoft and Facebook are also pursing work groups interested in next-generation enterprise collaboration software with newer products, and Jive was not able to translate its early success into a sustained run as competition grew.

Former Microsoft executive Elisa Steele was named CEO in February 2015, and she managed to get the company to turn its first quarterly profit ever last year. However, several hundred jobs were cut in that process, mostly in Portland.

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