Since Bloomberg blew the whistle the other day after finding out that SAP had been in talks to buy cloud-based Jive Software, but dropped the idea after deciding there was too much overlap between their product lines and Jive wouldn’t add enough market share, there’s been speculation that somebody else big will come along and scoop it up.
The names that come to mind are Oracle and IBM, even Salesforce.com, whose own social networking business software isn’t as comprehensive as Jive’s.
Jive is run by CEO Tony Zingale, who sold Mercury Interactive to HP for $4.5 billion in 2006 and Clarify to Nortel Networks for about $2.1 billion in 1999.
Jive’s market cap is currently $1.14 billion so it would take a few bucks to buy.
Forrester Research projects the market for social enterprise software will be worth $6.4 billion by 2016, up 60%.