Microsoft Acquires Yammer For $1.2 Billion

Sites include Microsoft.com , yammer.com . Published on July 2nd, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Enterprise social network Yammer is nothing to look at, but under the hood it’s a machine that is capable of generating billions. And now Microsoft has bought it for $1.2 billion.

The source of the deal was first broken by the Wall Street Journal but now everybody in financial news, including Bloomberg has pretty much reported the sale as a foregone conclusion.

Many are speculating about the deal, a few even suggesting that although the acquisition itself is big news for Microsoft, the software giant perhaps wouldn’t “call a press conference about it”.

That we shall see in a few weeks but for now the entire social enterprise networking space is going to be hot under the collar. How come Benioff of Salesforce.com didn’t see this one coming? Although not in the league or competitive space of Microsoft, Salesforce has been buying companies consistently in the last year or so and Yammer would fit perfectly into its solutions.

Benioff has missed a great opportunity. Microsoft on the other hand got a great pool of corporate clients with which to push its products and services on—and these guys as we all know, like to spend big.

As per the story broken by the Wall Street Journal, this deal is all but done. Should things go sour however, we’ll update you guys.