The Wall Street Journal have confirmed recent rumours of a Microsoft acquisition of Yammer. The price for the private social network for business is reported to be US $1 Billion. Apparently a cool 1B is the hot price right now after we recently seen Facebook pay around the same for Instagram.
Acquiring Yammer will assist Microsoft’s in bolstering its communication platforms like Lync and Skype and will likely integrate Yammer into existing business collaboration platforms like Office 365 and SharePoint. Yammer has already worked with Microsoft to implement Dynamics CRM integration. Yammer launched back in 2008 and has grown quickly to now be used inside more than 200,000 companies.
Often Yammer use begins as a grass roots movement inside a company as a platform for communicating around projects, but then gets recognised for its broader potential in entire organisation deployment. While its functions may mirror what’s available on twitter, the differentiator is its ability to share discussions between employees without making everything public.
Lets hope Microsoft make use of the Yammer technologies faster than they have with their $8B acquisition of Skype which currently more than a year on, still remains largely unchanged and unintegrated.
