Microsoft Ready To Buy Yammer For $1Bln?

Rumours started when a conversation at a coffee house in San Francisco was overheard. Now Bloomberg confirms that Microsoft is indeed willing to pay more than $1 billion to acquire social enterprise solution Yammer…

Yammer should help Microsoft to add social-networking tools to the suite of products it offers corporate customers. A strategic move Microsoft needs to defend its space in the war with Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and Google…

Oracle moved first, it bought Vitrue, a social media SaaS marketing application – a similar company as Buddy Media – in May 2012.

Salesforce, who’d already acquired Radian6 for $326 million in 2011, bought Buddy Media for $800 million in May 2012, already leaving Google biting in the dust.

IBM already bought SPSS in 2009, so they could sit relaxed? Or is this war on social making them a little shaky and will they go for another strategic acquisition?

Where does this leave Google in this space? It was too late with Vitrue and missed out on Buddy Media. Should they aim for Jive or is that too late either, since Jive had its IPO late 2011?

Yammer was founded in 2008 by David Sacks, the former chief operating officer at PayPal. It has raised more than $140 million in funding from venture firms and is used by 200.000+ companies including Ford and eBay.

Yammer competes with Jive Software (JIVE), with Chatter run by Salesforce, and Asana the company of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s.

Some interesting data from Bloomberg showed the following trend: information-technology giants are snapping-up start-ups, mostly way before they reach IPO, spending $17.4 billion on enterprise software acquisitions in 2011, compared with $715.5 million in 2009

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. What would you do if you were Google? What other major moves do you expect?

Source: Bloomberg