Yammer Brings Social Collaboration To SAP

Last year, Yammer debuted an integration with Salesforce to bring sales data from the CRM product into Yammer’s social collaboration feed. Today, Yammer is debuting a similar product enhancement with SAP, the first real data integration with an on-premise enterprise giant. Via a Yammer SAP connecter, updated from SAP ERP Central Component will appear as activity stories in Yammer’s Ticker. SAP customers who have installed the Yammer SAP Connector will see updates from all business suite applications including HR, ERP and CRM.

Yammer CEO David Sacks tells us that the connector was a built-in partnership with Freeborders, a certified SAP developer with deep expertise in SAP integration, and SAP actually wasn’t a part of this product. Here’s how it works. The Yammer SAP Connector is a plug-in installed on the customer’s SAP instance by Freeborders on-premise. The Connector will add the capability for users to follow data objects in SAP so when changes to those objects occur, an activity story describing the event will appear in Yammer’s Ticker. The activity story links back to the original record in SAP.

For example, a sales representative sees a SAP-generated activity story in their Yammer’s Ticker if a customer billing transaction failed. To follow-up, the rep can simply click on the activity story inside of Yammer, which will then open the ERP record directly in a separate tab.

This is all enabled by Yammer opening up its platform to allow developers to integrate Yammer log-ins in other applications, add the Yammer feed to be delivered into existing business applications and publish real-time activity stories from third-party business applications.

In addition to SAP, Yammer also today announced five new integration partners including GageIn, Kindling, Moreover Technologies, Planview and Sparqlight. Yammer also integrates with Badgeville, Box, Expensify, Microsoft SharePoint 2010, NetSuite, Spigit, TripIt and Zendesk.

Sacks tells us that Yammer’s APIs are based on Facebook’s open graph standard. “We’re taking what Facebook did with the open graph and applying this to the enterprise world. The world we are envisioning is that all enterprise software will share activity streams into Yammer,” he explains.

The SAP connector is particularly interesting considering it is one of the first legacy enterprise integrations that Yammer has debuted. Sacks says more legacy integrations are in the pipeline.

It’s no secret that Yammer is seeing major growth in the enterprise. And we should be hearing more about the company’s rumored $40 million-plus funding round soon.