Jive Software Names Elisa Steele Permanent CEO

Elisa Steele, the former chief marketing officer of Skype, has been named CEO of Jive Software after holding the position on an interim basis for about three months, the company said today.

The move, which is not entirely a surprise, followed the retirement in November of Tony Zingale, the former CEO who saw Jive through its 2011 IPO. Steele has also worked at Microsoft, Yahoo and NetApp.

Zingale, who endorsed Steele for the CEO job when he left, will remain as executive chairman.

Steele joined Jive last year as executive VP in charge of marketing, but was quickly promoted to CMO, then president in an “Office of the CEO,” which she occupied with Bill Lanfri, a partner at Accel Partners and a Jive director.

The news coincided with Jive’s fourth-quarter earnings report, which was somewhat better than analysts had expected. Jive posted a quarterly loss of seven cents a share on revenue of $47.7 million, beating the consensus view of analysts, who expected a loss of 10 cents and sales of $47.2 million.

The company said it expects sales in Q1 of $46 million to $47 million, a per-share loss of five cents to seven cents and sales for the coming year to come in between $195 million and $200 million. The forecasts were below expectations, and Jive’s shares fell by more than 6 percent after hours.

Jive is one of a handful of companies building “social enterprise” software that aims to streamline the way employees communicate and collaborate on projects within a company and with customers and business partners. Its rivals include Microsoft’s Yammer as well as newer products like Slack and Atlassian’s HipChat.

In an interview with Re/code, Steele said her primary focus will be to broaden Jive’s reach to corporate customers. “The customers who use it love Jive, and they don’t go back to whatever they might have been using before. They adopt Jive as the way to work and use it as a way to get closer to their customers” and to acquire new ones, she said.

Last week the company announced a trio of new products: Jive Daily, Jive Chime and Jive People, three mobile apps all aimed at changing how companies communicate and collaborate. Jive Daily is a live company news feed, allowing customers to update employees quickly on internal communications. Jive Chime, launching in the second quarter, is an internal conversation and messaging app. Jive People, due in Q3, is a company directory app.

The company has suffered some bumps in the road since going public, and its shares have declined by nearly 60 percent since its IPO on the Nasdaq a little more than three years ago. Last March, Re/code reported the company had explored a possible sale. That process had ended by May when it announced a strategic tie-up with Cisco Systems under which the networking giant retired some of its own collaboration products in order to resell Jive’s.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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