LogMeIn is buying Jive Communications for up to $357M to step up in enterprise unified comms

Yet more consolidation in the enterprise collaboration software market. Today LogMeIn, the company that offers conferencing services like GoToMeeting and join.me as well as authentication and other online services to businesses and others, announced that it would acquire Jive Communications for $342 million in cash plus up to $15 million based on reaching specific milestones in the next two years.

Jive Communications is not to be confused with Jive Software, the Slack competitor in enterprise collaboration that itself was acquired last year for $462 million by Aurea. However, it is also in a bigger area of enterprise communications, and underscores how we are continuing to see a lot of M&A and general growth in that market. This is a strong exit for Jive Communications, a Utah-based startup that had raised only around $31 million since it was founded in 2006.

The deal will add a suite of unified communications services that will complement and expand on LogMeIn’s existing collaboration products. Jive has 20,000 customers globally, LogMeIn said. Its primary focus is on VoIP for enterprises, and specifically hosted VoIP: while many people seem to be making a major switch away from fixed line services to mobile in the consumer and smaller business world, in the enterprise market the big shift has been from legacy phone services to VoIP — both for person-to-person and group calls — and so players like Jive are making a lot of inroads as a result of that. In addition to LogMeIn’s own products, other competitors to Jive include services like UberConference, Zoom and WebEx.

“Jive’s success in UCaaS is a testament to its modern cloud-based platform, its deliberate focus on customer satisfaction, and its renowned culture of innovation. We believe the combination of Jive’s award-winning voice, video, contact center and mobile applications with our leading collaboration products, GoToMeeting and join.me, will give LogMeIn one of the best and most comprehensive UCC offerings in the market,” said Bill Wagner, President and CEO of LogMeIn, in a statement. “The result is a deal that will accelerate our overall growth, set a new standard in the UCC market, and provide us with a foundation upon which we’ll build the next generation of LogMeIn’s UCC portfolio.”

John Pope, the CEO of Jive, will stay on running the business, reporting to Wagner. For his company, the deal will give Jive a lot more scale to grow its business. LogMeIn is significantly bigger in terms of market footprint with 25 million users, clocking seven million meetings, and over 900 million conferencing minutes each month.

“With market defining brands like GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, LogMeIn is one of the most recognized and respected names in collaboration – a leader with the reach, scale and resources capable of fueling Jive’s next chapter of growth and customer-focused innovation. They are also a company that shares our vision and philosophy for giving millions of people a better, simpler, friction-free way to communicate and collaborate on their terms,” said Pope, in a statement. “It’s a combination that immediately gives both parties the power to deliver significantly more value to our combined customer bases.”

The deal is expected to close in Q2 of this year.

LogMeIn has been looking for more ways to expand the types of services that its providing to its existing user base, as a route to expanding its overall revenues per customer. Last summer, the company acquired an Israeli startup called Nanorep, which makes chatbots and other AI-based tools, for up to $50 million.