It’s exciting for us to see young companies like Jive grow so fast. But before we pop the champagne bottles, it’s important to take these results with a grain of salt.
Jive announced today that it had record results for the past year, up 85%. That’s impressive in the sense that Jive is proving that its technology is gaining acceptance in the market and the fact that the company, founded in 2001, is almost 10 years old.
But we also need to consider that with any young company, there’s a lot riding on news like this.
Jive has some big-league investors. It’s critical that Jive shows them that all is going well and the road ahead is paved with gold.
That may well be the case. Jive is an important player in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 space. Along with its record revenues, Jive also announced that its bookings are up and its employee count now stands at 200 people, up 50%. Also, its Jive World event in 2010 will be twice as big as last year’s.
So, hats off to Jive in that regard for showing us, as an example, that its employee count is up. They are doing well, no doubt about it. But we have no idea how the results compare to last year and what the size of these deals look like. Jive does not share this information, as is the case with most private companies. It is up to us to make our own judgements about what’s really is meaningful.
We made the same point last week about Socialtext posting record results. We were equally curious about its results, too.
All of these companies reporting great news is a sign that the Enterprise 2.0 space is growing, but we need to be careful not to get too excited. Young companies can grow very fast. But it’s all relative compared to big companies. Numbers can look impressive but more often than not, you need to look at a number of factors before making any quick calls on how the company is actually faring in the market.
