Jive Software Acquires Meetings.io and Producteev To Enhance Social Platform With Real-Time Messaging And Task Management

Jive Software is acquiring meetings.io, a real-time communications platform, and Producteev, a cloud-based task management provider in a combined deal worth $7.6 million and 460,000 in Jive stock.

Meetings.io is a platform that Jive CEO Tony Zingale says fits into the company’s social platform by allowing screen sharing, video conferencing and the loosely fit pieces that make up a unified communications platform. The company’s technology  has deep similarities to Google Hangouts but in my view it also fits into the browser sharing market that you find with services such as GoInstant, the company Salesforce.com acquired earlier this year for $70 million.  Salesforce.com also has aspirations to develop a unified platform as illustrated in its DimDim acquisition almost two years ago.

The company is a a Y-Combinator alum. It launched in April with just under $1 million in seed funding from (among others) Yuri Milner and SV Angel, and the promise of making a free group video call as easy as clicking on a link, with nothing else required.

Producteev is designed to talke tasks out of email and into a more collaborative environment — again a play that fits with Jive’s social platform.

The Producteev acquisition shows how intensive the market has come for task management companies. Klint Finley wrote recently about Producteev and how it competes with Facebook Co-Founder Dustin Moskovitz’s startup Asana and Salesforce.com’s Do.com.

Producteev launched at Le Web in 2008. According to Ingrid Lunden, the company had raised $1.31 million in funding and recently passed the 2,000 paying-customers milestone. Finley writes that among those customers are Apple, Disney, and the Financial Times. It’s free for individuals, and group plans range from $20 to $500. In addition to the web version, there are clients for iOS, Android, OSX, and Windows.

Zingale said the deals are consistent with Jive’s overall strategy in acquiring innovative technologies and strong teams.

The Jive acquisitions point to the increasing competition between Jive and Salesforce.com with Box.com right in the middle. Jive is seeking to add more lightweight video collaboration and task management to its collaborative platform. It has a deep partnership with Box, which should be a simple fit for companies that want to integrate file management into the play. Salesforce.com on the other hand is building its own file management service to compete with Box. Both Jive and Salesforce.com will force deeper competition in the task management space. The question: Who is going to buy Asana?