Microsoft just announced that it has now officially completed the acquisition of Yammer, the four-year-old social networking company for enterprises. All the closing conditions have now been met and the Yammer team will now officially join the Microsoft Office Division. After weeks of rumors, the $1.2 billion acquisition was first announced in late June. According to Microsoft, the company is looking forward to “accelerating the adoption of Yammer’s standalone service, and enhancing the social capabilities in Microsoft’s communication and collaboration offerings.”
As Microsoft announced earlier this week, the next version of Office will come with Yammer as a default part of the popular productivity suite. So far, Microsoft hasn’t fully released its plans for how exactly it plans to integrate Yammer into its wider range of enterprise-focused services. At the time of the acquisition, Yammer reportedly had around 4 million registered users and about 20% of those paid for the company’s premium services.
This acquisition, as our own Colleen Taylor and Ingrid Lunden noted when the acquisition was first announced, will give Microsoft the ability to better compete with other social enterprise players, including Oracle, Salesforce and IBM.
Yammer, which launched at the TechCrunch 50 conference in 2008, raised about $142 million in venture funding before the acquisition.
Here is the full announcement from Microsoft:
Microsoft Welcomes Yammer to the Office Division
Today, we are pleased to announce that all closing conditions for Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer have been met, and the deal is completed.
We couldn’t be more pleased to welcome the Yammer team to the Microsoft Office Division. We’re excited about the road ahead. We look forward to accelerating the adoption of Yammer’s standalone service, and enhancing the social capabilities in Microsoft’s communication and collaboration offerings.
Posted by Jared Spataro
Senior Director, Office Division, Microsoft
Yammer (www.yammer.com) is an Enterprise Social Network that brings together employees, content, conversations, and business data in a single location. Built for the entrprise and loved by users, Yammer empowers employees to be more productive by enabling them to collaborate in real-time across departments, geographies, and business applications. Employees can create groups to collaborate on projects and share and edit documents. It is a new way of working that fosters team collaboration, employee engagement, and business transformation. The service can...
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
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