The deal is finally official this week on the Yammer buy. Given Yammer’s freemium model which was more free than premium and the product issues they faced scaling for true enterprise-class deployment, this presents a graceful exit from what could have been an uphill road over the next couple years. I laud Yammer financial investors for their timing in extracting an outstanding return on their investment.
In theory, this offers Microsoft a social patch to its SharePoint offering and possibly other office products.
In practice the how, the when, and the what, is going to matter to users who want to deploy today.
When I talk to buyers and users in the enterprise, the real issues have not changed. Enterprise social is not just about people. It’s about business processes and outcomes all being able to declare their status on the network, the choice between cloud or on-premise deployments, the complex requirements, security controls and ubiquitous mobility.
Buying decisions will be made on how well vendors respond to these issues and not media headlines.
What does this mean for us? Forrester Research ranked tibbr along with Yammer and Chatter as leaders in the space of enterprise social. So Yammer becomes Microsoft. Welcome to the party.
We’ve entered a new market environment. It’s rare in the enterprise software industry to see the user exert so much control on buying decisions The enterprise social market will not be determined by corporate boilerplate marketing, but the quality of the product. Moving from zero to one million paid users in 16 months, we feel pretty good about delivering on extreme value to the users and buyers.
The next couple of months are going to be very noisy, but fun.
