This week Jive Software took steps towards launching an IPO by filing an S1. Many have focused on the company’s lack of profitability and deep losses (see Dennis Howlett’s coverage for a particularly harsh take on it). But as Constellation Research founder and CEO Ray Wang told us in an interview, there were no real surprises in the filing.

Along with Socialtext, Jive was one of the first players in the enterprise social collaboration space, and it’s no surprise that it will likely be the first of these startups to go public. As I mentioned earlier today everyone loves to play the “who should buy what” game. The “which companies will go public” game isn’t as popular. But the the occasion of Jive’s filing provides us with an opportunity to assess the current state of a few companies that are likely to launch an IPO sooner or later.

Sooner

Atlassian

Analysts and pundits have been expecting an Atlassian IPO for some time now. Atlassian became an early player in what came to be known as enterprise 2.0 when it launched its second product, Confluence, a wiki that’s become popular with developers. Atlassian also sells JIRA, a bug tracking system, and owns the code repository BitBucket.

The company was bootstrapped and profitable, but took on a $60 million investment from Accel last year. When the news broke, TechCrunch wrote:

In order to get a return on its minority stake, Accel is expecting Atlassian to one day have a very successful IPO. But Accel partner Richard Wong is in no rush. He thinks an IPO is likely once the company passes $100 million in revenue. And if revenues continue to grow 30 percent a year, that will be only a few years away.

I think we’ll be seeing that IPO sooner than later.

Alfresco

Alfresco is a relatively quiet success in the enterprise 2.0/collaboration space. It’s an open source enterprise content management system vendor founded by John Newton, who was also one of the co-founders of Documentum. Alfresco recently launched a slick new collaboration tool called Alfresco Team.

When news of the Jive IPO broke, former Alfresco VP of business development (now filling the same role at Strobe) Matt Asay tweeted:

Asay has been talking up an Alfresco IPO for years, and I wouldn’t surprised to see this happen soon – it’s mostly a question of whether the company really wants to.

Later

Acquia

Acquia sells enterprise support and hosting for the Drupal open source content management system. It was founded in 2007 by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert in order to commercialize the platform. Last month Buytaert told the Belgian publication De Tijd: “The continued development of Acquia is so planned out that any IPO is possible, but in the next two years we do not expect any concrete talks to start negotiations.”

Acquia got a big boost this year when it picked up Al Jazeera as a customer during the Arab Spring. It boasts other high profile customers such as Fox News and The Economist. whitehouse.gov also runs Drupal, but does not appear to be an Acquia customer.

Acquia is growing aggressively and just made two acquisitions last week: Cyrve, a Drupal migration service provider, and Growing Venture Solutions, which provides security services for Drupal.

Box

Box is a cloud storage company that has quickly evolved this year from being a Dropbox alternative for business to being 1) a piece of slick middleware connecting “serious” ECM tools such as Documentium and SharePoint to tools like Google Docs and 2) a user-friendly mobile access point to said ECM solutions. Its mobile solution in particular has received high praise from analysts. The company has also built out a strong Lucene-based search infrastructure and is building a consulting practice.

Box is run by Aaron Levie, a young CEO with a Zuckerbergian image. Like Zuckerberg, Levie created Box while still in college. When Box took an additional $48 million in funding in February this month Levie told Venture Beat: “The expectation is that this would take us to profitability or an event like an IPO.” He would be one of the youngest CEOs in the enterprise technology space to take a company public. (Box has since raised an additional $35 million.)

Yammer

Yammer CEO David Sacks hasn’t been shy about the fact that Yammer is on the IPO path. Last year he told Investors.com: “That would be our goal, to go IPO, but I can’t speak to a specific timeline yet.” As we reported earlier this week, Yammer claims to have a large portion of paying customers but is investing heavily in R&D.

As the COO of PayPal, Sacks lead that company to its IPO, so he certainly has the experience to do it again at Yammer.

Services Angle

We’re seeing the first wave of enterprise social companies grow-up. In particular, the content management and enterprise wiki spaces have matured. Meanwhile, the next generation of IPO-bound companies are focusing on services, hosting and integration.