Social enterprise giant Jive is continuing its shopping spree today, picking up OffiSync, an Israeli startup that adds a collaboration layer to Microsoft Office applications, we’ve confirmed. The deal was first reported in Israeli publication The Marker, which estimates the acquisition size to be around $25 to $30 million.
OffiSync offers a a plugin for Microsoft Office that serves as a bridge between Office and Google Docs. When it first launched, the app’s primary feature was to save Office documents to your Google account. It’s since integrated Google Image Serach into Office, and added support for Google Sites.
The application allows you to do Office-to-Office collaboration, and you can also have users editing the same document from Google Docs’ online interface. Changes aren’t synced as you type in each character, but rather each time you hit the ‘save’ button. Offisync is offered under a freemium model, but recently tweaked its pricing to offer more free features.
Jive’s CEO Tony Zingale says that this is a game changing acquisition for Jive, which combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more.
“With OffiSync, Jive has the opportunity to become the most widely adopted Social Business platform for over 600 million Microsoft users, giving them the ability to bring social to the way they work. We continue to drive the agenda for Social Business leadership and set the standard for the market,” Zingale explains.
Jive was already integrated with OffiSync but now will be launching a much deeper, richer connection with the collaboration plugin. Users will be able to share, annotate and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents from within Jive’s social platform. Additionally, Jive and OffiSync will allow users view and reply to discussions on the Jive platform from their Microsoft Outlook inbox.
And of course, the integration will bring Jive’s social enterprise platform, including profiles and activities, to Microsoft Outlook. Clearly, this integration brings a much richer sand integrated social enterprise experience for
The OffiSync team, most of whom are currently based in Tel Aviv, Israel, will join Jive’s engineering organization, and Jive plans to launch a new R&D center in Tel Aviv. The team in Israel will be lead by Roy Antebi, OffiSync co-founder and CTO, who will join Jive as VP of Engineering. Oudi Antebi, OffiSync co-founder and CEO, will join Jive Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions. In his new role, Oudi will drive Jive’s vision and strategy for integration with Microsoft and the broader enterprise stack.
This is Jive’s second acquisition in the past two months—Jive just acquired social data startup Proximal Labs.