Microsoft to Acquire Yammer for $1.2 Billion

Microsoft will acquire enterprise social network provider Yammer for $1.2 billion in cash, confirming a weeks-long rumor that had clearly caught the attention of the Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM communities.

At last week's Decisions Spring 2012 conference, attendees treated the acquisition as a foregone conclusion, asking Dynamics product managers on each day for details on when and how an integrated solution would be brought to market.  Dynamics product managers had nothing to say last week on the topic.

(Ed.: All the sessions from Decisions are still available on demand)

Yammer will join the Microsoft Office Division, led by division President Kurt DelBene, and the team will continue to report to current CEO David Sacks.

After four years in business, Yammer boasts an offering with broad enterprise adoption, including use by 85 percent of the Fortune 500.  The service was one of the early proponents of serving up an enterprise social strategy that took elements of Twitter or Facebook and adopted them to business users' needs and interests.  Yammer will continue to develop its standalone service, while Microsoft will also continue looking at ways to offer the product in combination with Microsoft Dynamics, Office 365, SharePoint, and Skype.

"When we started Yammer four years ago, we set out to do something big," Sacks said. "We had a vision for how social networking could change the way we work. Joining Microsoft will accelerate that vision and give us access to the technologies, expertise and resources we'll need to scale and innovate."

With the announcement, Microsoft even put out this ...