Microsoft is currently in talks to acquire Yammer Incorporated, which operates a social network for businesses, according to two different people familiar with the whole situation. According to the report, Microsoft may pay more than $1 billion with a deal being made as soon as June 15.
Gaining Yammer would help Microsoft add social networking tools to the suite of products that it offers to corporate customers. Large information technology companies are buying up smaller startup companies before they reach initial public offering. It has been reported that these companies spent an estimated $17.4 billion on enterprise software acquisitions in 2011 alone, compared to $715.5 million spent in 2009.
This Yammer deal would follow a lot of other recent enterprise software purchases that are centered around social media. Buddy Media Incorporated was recently purchased by Salesforce.com Incorporated for $745 million while Oracle recently purchased two companies that analyze data on social media sites, Virtue Incorporated and Collective Intellect Incorporated.
Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw has declined to comment on the potential deal, as did Deanna McPherson, a spokeswoman for Yammer. Yammer was founded in 2008 by David Sacks, the former Chief Operating Officer at PayPal Incorporated. Since then, the company has raised over $140 million in funding from venture firms, including Charles River Ventures Incorporated and Emergence Capital Partners.
Yammer has over 200,000 companies that use the service regularly, including Ford Motor Company and EBay Incorporated. In addition to that, Yammer provides features for internal corporate use that are very similar to those on Facebook. Yammer also competes with Jive Software Incorporated and Chatter, run by Salesforce.com and Asana Incorporated, run by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s company.
Maybe Google is trying to breath new life into Google Plus, the company’s very own social media service. When it launched, Google Plus was slightly over-hyped and never really took off like people expected it to. That being said, Google Plus is still a pretty decent service. Maybe Yammer will help the service really take off.
Source: Bloomberg – Microsoft Said To Hold Talks On Buying Yammer Social Site
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