In my ongoing quest to follow the money, BoomTown showed up at the Palo Alto, Calif., offices of Jive Software last week to talk about its recent $30 million funding from Kleiner Perkins.
Its existing venture investor, Sequoia Capital, was also in the round, which brings the grand total of dough to $57 million, all dedicated to making Jive the leader in bringing social tools to the enterprise.
It’s probably too lazy to say Jive’s goal is to be the Facebook for businesses, but that just about sums it up–offering software for social collaboration in the workplace.
That includes communications, blogging, polls, sharing and other typical kinds of social networking features, trying to give workers what they already have easy access to in their personal lives.
That includes tapping outside sources people use–including a recent integration of LinkedIn profiles and Twitter tweets.
That’s no small business, but it is also one that is rife with all kinds of competitors, big and small, all trying to solve the problem in different ways.
It’s a big marketplace to win, of course, which is why Jive brought in CEO Tony Zingale earlier this year, part of a move toward an IPO.
He is a longtime tech exec, most recently as head of Mercury Interactive, which sold to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) for $4.5 billion.
Zingale, who has moved Jive’s HQ from Portland, Ore., to Silicon Valley, has been trying to juice business, which is now 3,000 customers and 15 million users, and is aiming for $100 million in revenue run rate this year.
Zingale talked about all this and more in the video interview below, along with Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who has joined the Jive board.
