It was one of the biggest news, a kind of revival for enterprise social network companies, when Microsoft announced to pay a whopping $1.2 billion for Yammer. Even Yammer might not have believed what they heard about the deal but when Microsoft makes deal it got to be somewhere in the range of billions. The purchase of yammer by Microsoft was strategic and with long-term vision. Once Microsoft took over Yammer its sales almost tripled to $60 million and the company sees strong growth in the coming years. If number speaks then according to yammer they have 7 million registered users and the numbers of paying customers have also increased substantially. The number seems to grow exponentially once the product gets integrated with Microsoft office 365 and Sharepoint.
Yammers pricing has undergone some tweaks, the basic plan is free and paid plan cost $3/user/month before Microsoft takeover the same plan costs $15/user/month the sharp price drop has led increase in paid customers. The free version comes with some standard features like activity streams, polls, groups, and group admin features that allow you to moderate over the content. The paid version comes with advanced security and administration controls. David Sacks, Yammer's co-founder and current corporate vice president in Microsoft's Office division told in a Bloomberg Businessweek story that they have making revenue on high volume paid sales. Yammer will soon be available for enterprise integrated with sharepoint for $4/user/month and with Office 365 for $8/user/month. With fierce competition from established vendors like Jive, salesforce and Tibco software, young enterprise social network company like yammer has tough road ahead. Though it is hard to say what future hold for yammer but as of now we can see that Microsoft is doing everything to monetize its $1.2 billion investments.
