Microsoft, LinkedIn CEOs Share Early Plans for Growth, Integration

Following today's news that Microsoft is acquiring LinkedIn, the companies' CEOs Satya Nadella and Jeff Weiner, spoke to financial analysts about the $29.2 billion deal and how well it "checks all the boxes" that Microsoft uses to evaluate acquisition opportunities.

While specific plans for bringing LinkedIn into the fold remain flexible, Nadella and Weiner floated a range of ideas and themes today, from broadening LinkedIn membership to enhancing Dynamics CRM and Office 365 products, to opening up APIs and more.

The most straight forward opportunity for the two teams, according to Weiner, is in scaling the LinkedIn member base. He explained further on today's call that:

"There's a meaningful opportunity for scale here by virtue of the alignment. So, you take our network, 433 [million] members thus far to-date, about 100 million plus monthly actives and you seamlessly integrate that throughout Microsoft's global footprint of over a 1 billion customers. A 1 billion customers that contextually are as relevant as it gets in terms of our addressable opportunity.

"And you think about bringing that social layer, the power of connections, professional identity to specific properties, specific assets like Outlook, Calendar, Office, Windows, Skype, Dynamics and we're both very excited about where we can take that part of the business."

Building a better LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration

Nadella and Weiner outlined several "illustrations" on today's call of areas where they plan to invest in product development to bring the companies closer together. Themes included social selling, marketing, and talent management.