Microsoft Corp. and Yammer Inc. today made it official. As previously reported, Microsoft will acquire the enterprise social network company for $1.2 billion in cash.
Yammer’s CEO David Sacks (pictured, at left) will join the Microsoft Office Division and report to division president Kurt DelBene (pictured, at right), while all of Yammer’s team will continue to report to Sacks. Yammer will continue to develop its standalone service.
DelBene said the combination of Yammer, SharePoint and Office 365 will provide the most comprehensive and flexible solutions available for enterprise social networking. “I picture people being able to use Yammer to manage and expand their professional relationships, share and collaborate on Office documents, stay informed about content updates, and to seamlessly move from status updates and feeds into voice and video conversations,” he wrote in a blog post.
Launched in 2008, Yammer now has more than 5 million corporate users, including employees at 85 percent of the Fortune 500. Microsoft plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.
Related links:
Microsoft – press release
Microsoft – Kurt DelBene blog post
Photo of David Sacks and Kurt DelBene courtesy of Microsoft.
I work for a CRM supplier here in Houston, TX and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is one of our most popular products. “Social CRM” has been the buzzword in our industry for a couple of years now – it’ll be exciting to see whether this acquisition will lead to a truly social CRM tool.
Anyhow, thanks for sharing! – Aly