There is a chitchat that Microsoft is going to buy Yammer? Is it true? If so, why will Microsoft do that?
Microsoft is going to buy Yammer
Yes there is a talk going around the people who familiar with this subject that Microsoft is going to buy the social initiative software company Yammer, which provides social networking software for more than 200,000 major businesses.
Although nether of the companies confirmed this yet, it is highly likely this arrangement would be finalized in next few days. According to a report by Bloomberg News the worth of this deal would be more than $1 billion.
Yammer is internet based software that allows workers to work together and share information in a social networking environment instead software like Microsoft Office.
Microsoft could possibly look to integrate this technology to their Office packages which drive Microsoft into future market of social-enterprise tools. In other hand this deal would be helpful to Yammer overcome the competition with Salesforce.com tool Chatter.
Microsoft is going to buy Yammer
Actually, 11 days after you posted this inquiry Microsoft did purchased Yammer. Yammer or Yammer, Inc. is a freemium enterprise social network service launched in 2008 and was later acquired by Microsoft in 2012.
It is used for private communication in organizations. It was originally designed as an internal communication system for Geni, a genealogy website.
Access to Yammer network is verified by the internet domain of the user to make sure that only those individuals that have the right email addresses can join their particular networks. It was on September 8, 2008 when Yammer was actually launched at the TechCrunch50 conference.
This was after David Sacks, a co-founder and also a former executive of PayPal, developed the basic concept of Yammer while he was working on a startup project after leaving his executive position in 2002.
Besides its communication function, it also allows third-party developers to create and sell their collaborative programs straight to users. Around April of 2010 when Yammer CEO Sacks said that Yammer revenue was already doubling each quarter but he doesn’t want to reveal the income figures for 2009 and just describes it as “7 figures”.
He also said that 70% of Fortune 500 companies were already using Yammer that time. By around September of 2010, the service was now being used by 80,000 companies and more than 3 million users worldwide.
This includes 80% of Fortune 500. This was also the time when Yammer 2.0 was released and was described as “Facebook for business”.
It was on June 25, 2012 when Microsoft purchased Yammer for US$1.2 billion in cash. After that, Microsoft announced that the Yammer team would be included into the Microsoft Office division but would still continue reporting to Sacks.
As of June 12, 2013, Yammer has already received about US$142 million in funding from venture capital firms like Goldcrest Investments, Charles River Ventures, Founders Fund, Ron Conway, and Emergence Capital Partners.
The total number of subscribers as of the moment is already close to 8 million.
