At Student Story, we have always thought that the Social Web of today, will vastly power how companies interact within, and with the world outside; and the acquisition of Yammer by Microsoft just reinforced our belief. The Social Web is here to stay, and it will influence your business, whether you like it or not.
The Yammer Story
Yammer, launched in 2008, is an enterprise social networking solution provider. Used by at least 200,000 companies across the globe, it's a potent force in the way corporates collaborate within their professional networks. Interestingly, Peter Thiel who was the first person to invest in Facebook, is also the first person who has invested in Yammer. Statistically speaking, 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Yammer as their corporate networking solution, including Deloitte, Ford, 7-Eleven, etc.
David Sacks, the CEO and co-founder of Yammer, launched it officially at the TechCrunch50 Conference, to much critical acclaim, with simple features like posts, updates and conversations. Today Yammer has features like Events, Topics, Presence, Enhanced Analytics and more features that would suit a corporate work culture.
The Acquisition
Microsoft in a statement, said they would acquire Yammer for a whopping $1.2 Billion, Hear that Students? Social Web is big, and it will only get bigger.
“The acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love.” said Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft. “Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services.”
In a blog titled "Yammer's next Chapter" CEO David Sacks makes some reassuring statements to Yammer's stakeholders.
Here is an excerpt:
"When Adam Pisoni and I started Yammer, we set out to do something big. When most people thought social networking was for kids, we had a vision for how it could change the way we work. Four years ago, we started paddling out to catch the wave that we’re riding today.
With the backing of Microsoft, our aim is to massively accelerate our vision to change the way work gets done with software that is built for the enterprise and loved by users.
As a Yammer customer, you will continue to get a secure, private social network—delivered with the same focus on simplicity, innovation, and cross-platform experiences. Over time, you’ll see more and more connections to SharePoint, Office365, Dynamics and Skype.
Yammer’s expertise in empowering employees, driving voluntary adoption, and delivering rapid innovation in the cloud will not only continue to power our stand-alone service, but also help shape the communication and collaboration experiences in Office 365."
So what will Microsoft Do with Yammer?
Microsoft will most certainly integrate Yammer’s technology with Office, Office 365, Sharepoint (Microsoft's own people-powered web content management suite), Dynamics (CRM), and Skype. Microsoft will leave Yammer as a standalone cloud service; that will not change. As the above infographic suggests, Collaboration and enterprise social networking will go hand-in-hand.
And this trend also augments on to the recent happenings in IT - a silent social revolution. More and more products are cloud-powered today, and not only cloud-powered or crowd-sourced but they are social. Oracle, Salesforce and IBM are other top players in this area, and Microsoft just stormed in with this acquisition.