One year to the day
after Microsoft announced that it would acquire enterprise social
networking tool Yammer for $1.2 billion, the pair are today publishing
some updated usage numbers and news about a raft of new features to
demonstrate that Yammer is on the up and up, and that Microsoft is
riding the wave. This includes more subscribers, more people paying for
service and much tighter Microsoft integration — but also partnerships
with companies outside of Microsoft’s walls, such as a new partnership
with Klout, to enhance what users can do with Yammer.
The company says that in the last year, total subscribers are up 55%
and are now approaching 8 million, with usage activity — that includes
messages, and photo/file exchanges — doubling in that time. Yammer says
that paid networks increased by 200% over last year, although it doesn’t
give an indication as to how much that translates into in terms of
actual revenues or users. Recall that when Yammer was acquired, the
company said that 20%, or 800,000 users, of its total subscriber base
was paying for services; but at the time it didn’t break out how many
networks made up that number. And in February 2013, Yammer noted 7 million users and paid user growth of 165%, adding 290 accounts in Q4 of 2012.
“A year ago, Microsoft presented us with an amazing opportunity to
accelerate our business in the areas of both product and distribution,”
Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks writes in a
blog post. “Today we are seeing those benefits come to fruition.”
But Yammer and Microsoft have to keep a fine balance in how they go
forward. On one hand, they are trying to show that Microsoft is putting
its $1.2 billion social acquisition to work — if not in specific revenue
terms, at least in terms of value-add for the wider range of software
products that Microsoft offers. But on the other hand, mindful that
Yammer has a number of subscribers who extend beyond those using
Microsoft products, it is trying to show that the company remains
independent and not simply another extension of the Microsoft shop, by
continuing to link up with third parties.
First to the Microsoft enhancements. The company today said that
Yammer will be getting a boost in coming months with significantly more
integrations with existing products. These include:
- Further integration between Yammer and email. No details yet on how this would work, and whether this is Outlook-exclusive or would extend to other platforms;
- Enhanced document collaboration. This will give
users of Yammer and Office 365 more document editing capabilities.
(Looks a bit like a Huddle competitor in that regard.)
- Expanded Yammer messaging and external communication.
This is something of a holy grail in my book with Yammer. Will this be
long-awaited Skype integration? In any case, Yammer has been sorely in
need of more real-time elements and hopefully this will mean more of
them.
Further down the road there will also be more SharePoint search
integration. Again, this is another way of using Yammer to enhance one
of Microsoft’s existing products and make both more useful; although it
would be great if it could be used with other platforms that were
non-Microsoft-based as well.
These plans come on the back of recent integrations that have included
adding the Yammer newsfeed for users of SharePoint Online and Office 365, and plans to add the new
Yammer app to the Office Store
to drive more users. The latter, Microsoft says, will be in place by
the end of June and will let users embed Yammer group feeds into
SharePoint sites.
It’s not too much of a surprise to see that for now most of the
efforts for new services at Yammer are aimed at improving channels with
other Microsoft products but the company continues to try to show that
Yammer is doing more than just expanding on that front. To that end, the
company today noted that it has doubled the number of partners in its
app directory — Yammer’s smaller equivalent of Facebook’s App Center —
in the last year, with developers using Yammer APIs now up by 70%.
As with those numbers around paying users, Pavan Tapadia, chief
product officer for Yammer, doesn’t spell out what that growth
translates to in actual figures, but today the company is highlighting
one of their new, and more high-profile partners: Klout.
This integration will let Yammer users publish Klout scores and
expertise on their Yammer profiles, and for those companies that choose
to do it, they can also turn on an additional feature which applies
Klout’s algorithm to a user’s internal activity on Yammer itself to
create network-specific Klout scores.
As with Klout’s role in the wider world, it’s hard to decide whether
there is really any merit to knowing about how influential a person is,
but presumably if you are in a large enough work network that you don’t
know certain colleagues all that well, it can be a useful bridge to
collaborating more closely with them in the future.
“If you’re someone who has a lot of influence in the public
social-sphere, this is a cool way to showcase your Klout score in the
workplace,” writes Tapadia optimistically in a
blog post.
“The second aspect of integration allows Yammer admins to turn on a
deeper integration with Klout to produce Yammer-specific Klout scores
for employees based on their activity within their company’s Yammer
network. This is a great opportunity for organizations to identify top
contributors and subject matter experts based on their Yammer
participation.”
Source:
TechCrunch
