If Microsoft buys Yammer, as unconfirmed press reports indicate, Susan Gautsch hopes the Yammer team won’t lose the qualities she has appreciated in the several years her employer has been a customer.
The Yammer team has been attentive to customers and quick to improve and extend its product, said Gautsch, e-learning director at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business, which has been using the enterprise social networking tool since 2009.
“I’ve always appreciated their rapid [product] development and they’ve always been very responsive to their customer base,” said Gautsch, who’s a member of Yammer’s customer advisory board.
Citing anonymous sources, Bloomberg reported Thursday that Microsoft is in advanced talks to acquire Yammer for about US$1 billion. Microsoft and Yammer declined to comment.
The news has generated reactions on social media channels from Yammer customers, industry observers, partners and competitors, with the debate focused on what the future would hold for Yammer’s staff and product with Microsoft as parent company.
What’s clear is that the acquisition would help Microsoft beef up the enterprise social features in collaboration products like SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office.
Products like Yammer allow organizations to offer employees Twitter-like and Facebook-like functionality in a workplace setting. They let employees set up profiles, do microblogging, participate in discussion forums and receive activity stream notifications about what their colleagues are doing.
The promise of such products is that they can improve the way employees communicate and collaborate by complementing e-mail, IM and other more traditional tools. The products can be integrated with other business applications and managed by the IT department.
Microsoft and other vendors selling collaboration stacks, like IBM and Cisco Systems, have been incorporating enterprise social networking (ESN) functionality into their products. Enterprise application vendors are doing likewise, including Salesforce.com, SAP and Oracle.
But Microsoft is behind competitors in building native ESN features into its products, said Gartner analyst Larry Cannell.
“Microsoft has the weakest social play in the market,” he said. “With Yammer they would immediately become a very strong competitor in the social workplace.”