The much anticipated and highly rumored announcement finally hit the wires today. One of the biggest questions was where would the company reside in the Microsoft organization, a question that was also answered today, the Microsoft Office Division under Division President Kurt DelBene. Yammer will continue to be lead by founder / CEO David Sacks and will continue to be housed in its current San Francisco location. According to Microsoft the integration will be handled in a similar way to the Skype acquisition, with a notable exception that Skype is its own division.

On the press and analysts call this afternoon a few details did come out, although of course it's still early to really get a detailed picture of the level of... Read the article

I spent the past week in San Francisco attending Netsuite's annual user conference, SuiteWorld. As with most software conferences there was the usual barrage of announcements including new features, new partners and refined strategies. Of course SAP also held its Sapphire conference at the same time, so you may have had a hard time making it through all the announcement noise to see what was important from Netsuite (I'll leave the SAP Sapphire commentary at this point to my colleagues).

In the Cloud ERP arena Netsuite, the first full SaaS ERP system, continues to raise the competitive bar and deliver key functionality to its rapidly growing customer base. Last year at its first SuiteWorld conference Netsuite articulated a strategy that focused on several vertical variants and... Read the article

I managed a few minutes out of my schedule last week to stop by the Yammer Tour event in San Francisco. I was in San Francisco doing a keynote for sugarCRM's user event and luckily the events overlapped. As I was listening to Yammer CEO David Sacks talk about some of the new Yammer features and interview some customers, I was struck by how much social tools like Yammer are changing businesses. Yes, I know that's almost all I've talked about for the last 4-5 years, changing businesses with social technologies and driving real cultural changes, but seeing that transformation really makes an impression. It's easy to get lost in all of the forward looking research and discussion on technology when in fact, what really matters is what businesses are actually doing with the tools to get some real business benefits. Does using social tools for business really make any difference? There are all sorts of ways to measure value when it comes to technology, we wrote a whitepaper on the ROI of social that has some ideas. Social business impacts business processes across the company and is having some interesting and very positive returns. Not all are as obvious as others though, and some of the less obvious are perhaps the most transformative.

First I should say that for me, social initiatives need to be clearly tied to increasing revenue, increasing margin, fostering innovation and/or increasing ... Read the article

Last week Yammer and Ultimate Software announced a partnership that combines the Yammer enterprise social network with Ultimate's UltiPro HCM. Combining the deep employee profile from the corporate HCM system with a real time social collaboration tool is an important step in building out a complete enterprise social network, connecting employees to each other and to partners and customers. A modern HCM system contains critical workforce intelligence that starts with recruitment and includes job history, compensation and payroll, performance, skills / talent and career development data...all the relevant employee transaction data (system of transaction). The system of ... Read the article

We were able to assemble a powerful cast of experts to give the rest of us advice on becoming a Social Business. But we did it with one catch.  We asked these 9 experts to do it in under 60 seconds.

Thank you Robert Lavigne for essentially doing all of the video, post production and graphics for these 9 videos.  He’s a phenomenal person. 

The Video is interactive. Meaning you can click on the profiles in the video in order to see their individual response.  Alternatively, you can follow the video links of each of our experts below. 

 

... Read the article

Yammer thrives. The herd mentality around the enterprise activity stream is driving its competitors to emulate their every move.  Jive’s done it.  So has Salesforce.com, SocialText, Newsgator, Moxie Software and IBM Connections. From the Fortune 500 to the Fortuneless company of one, the activity stream is supplanting email for many forms of business communication.  

What’s going on here?

There are several reasons for the change, but to the extent they may have a common denominator I believe the answer lies in the solutions’ ease of use.  “With Yammer, people can just start using it. There’s no formal deployment process. You don’t have to install anything”, explained David Sacks, CEO of Yammer.

Across companies large and small, employees feel the social enterprise is within their reach, and they’re letting their executives know it.  Why now? One reason is. ... Read the article