Enterprise social network Yammer is to be sold to Microsoft for more than $1 billion dollars, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing "a person familiar with the matter".
Founded in 2008, Yammer provides tools for companies to build private social networks within the walls of their enterprise, allowing their employees to communicate as they do on public social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
The companies have yet to comment on the report. Microsoft has invited the press to a "major media announcement" on Monday 18th of June.
Microsoft has been making moves to improve the social collaboration features of its productivity software. In fact, Yammer was integrated with Microsoft’s Dynamics business applications suite,back in April, letting Yammer users see CRM and ERP activity in their social feeds.
Microsoft had previously taken steps to integrate Dynamics with Office, Sharepoint and Lync, announcing that social collaboration tools would now run across all of the services in October last year. "Businesses will be able to expand their relationships with customers and gain even deeper insight and understanding," Microsoft promised at the time.
The reported deal follows a flurry of social collaboration acquisitions in April.
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Yammer itself acquired oneDrum, a UK-based company that allows teams to collaborate on shared Microsoft Office documents. At the time, Yammer said that the acquisition would allow it to offer a more social, collaborative alternative to traditional enterprise content management (ECM) systems.
Application infrastructure and virtualisation vendor Citrix announced its intention to acquire Podio, a Danish software-as-a-service collaboration and project management tool which allows users to form social groups and follow one another’s activity streams.
And thirdly, IT services giant Atos bought French online community software provider Blue Kiwi. The company sells social collaboration systems that are tailored to the requirements of business functions, such as marketing, HR or ‘innovation’.
