Yammer sold to Microsoft for $1.2 Billion in Cash

By Jim Lundy

Yammer is no longer an independent company, as it was announced today that it is being bought by Tech Titan Microsoft. Yammer will land in the Office division, where Microsoft Office President Kurt Delbene holds court.  We’ll be writing a full Aragon Research First Cut on this announcement, but we wanted to get some thoughts out right away.

Yammer goes Enterprise

Yammer is one of the rising providers of Enterprise Social Software. They have been hard at work with a freemium offer for years, but recently they have started converting large enterprises and putting up some large user numbers by converting those free accounts into paid ones.

Yammer and Microsoft SharePoint

For Microsoft SharePoint users, this is nothing but good news. It gives them a lot of options on how to share their content that has been inside of those growing SharePoint Server farms and with the easy-to-use Yammer interface, it makes going Social a lot easier. For users that have other Social plug-ins such as Newsgator, those are still very viable options as well.

There are still many unanswered questions that this merger raises.  Some have to do with Cloud vs On-Premise. Some have to do with SharePoint plugins, as well as the next wave of SharePoint.  We have the answers.

Join us for our Microsoft buys Yammer Webinar, this Wednesday at 11 am PDT. Sign-up here.

Editors Note:  For other Research on Yammer, see our recent First Cut. Check back later this week for our first Aragon Globe on Enterprise Social Software.