Dive Brief:

• Jive Software Inc. announced Monday its acquisition by ESW Capital. Jive is set to become part of Aurea, a company that operates various types of enterprise software businesses. The transaction is valued at $462 million, a premium that represents a 20% increase of the average closing stock price of Jive. 

• Aurea plans to integrate Jive into its existing customer experience management platform, merging "customer experience and employee and customer engagement," according to the announcement. The companies expect the transaction to be completed in June 2017. 

• Jive, one of the original enterprise collaboration tools, debuted 16 years ago and boasts customers like T-Mobile, McAfee and EMC, TechCrunch reports.

Dive Insight:

Jive was one of the original enterprise communication and collaboration platforms, enjoying significant popularity between about 2006 and 2012 as one of the first companies to really take on enterprise collaboration. 

Once newer companies like Slack entered the market with a fresh twist on enterprise communication, fans of Jive faded a bit.

Today, Facebook and Microsoft have unveiled tools for the market, bringing their brand recognition and customer base with them. Given the shifting landscape, becoming part of Aurea will allow Jive to maintain its market share and further scale its offerings. 

Jive may have been ahead of its time, coming to fruition before enough enterprises understood and were ready to adopt communication and collaboration platforms. Today, it’s a different story. A recent survey by Harvard Business Review found 90% of respondents said they expect collaboration technology to become more important to their organizations over the next two years.