After a long period of speculation, Microsoft has finally committed 1.2 billion dollars to acquire Yammer, a social network service enterprise for businesses in USA, UK and Canada. This is indeed a great deal for Yammer which was just launched in 2008 and has around 4 to 5 million users. However, it is actually the users who are most concerned with the buyoff as people are speculating that the users have to start paying for services from Yammer which was free before the acquisition.
However, the CEO of Yammer, Mr. David Sacks have assured the users that even after the billion dollar investment by Microsoft, Yammer will still continue to provide free services to their clients. Although, Microsoft and Yammer both have big plans for this venture, there won’t be any sudden changes in the way Yammer works. According to credible sources from these companies, Yammer will stick to the “freemium” business model though it will move under the Microsoft wing. At the current time, both the companies are aiming for a synergetic strategy leading to a win-win situation for them and also for the users.
A couple of unconfirmed reports have also indicated about Microsoft will integrate Yammer with its Office 365, SharePoint and also Microsoft Dynamics in order to expand the network of this company and also try to compete with Google which already leading in cloud based office applications. The senior director of Microsoft’s Office division, Jared Spataro have also concurred with this in his tweet that they will promote Yammer’s standalone services and also boost the social capabilities in Microsoft’s communication and collaboration offerings. So hopefully, people will see a tight integration of Yammer with SharePoint which will be included in the next version of Office 360 by 2013. However, the facts are still hazy and they won’t be confirmed until the fall. Till then, the Yammer users will be able to use the services as prior to the acquisition without any changes.
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