Microsoft Confirms $1.2 Billion Yammer Buy

The Brainyard: Confirming earlier reports, Microsoft said that it will purchase enterprise social software vendor Yammer for $1.2 billion. Yammer will become part of the Microsoft Office division, which is also the home of Microsoft’s SharePoint software. The company said that Yammer will continue to function as a standalone service, but that Microsoft will also seek to deepen Yammer integration with SharePoint, Office 365 and other Microsoft products.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer noted that Yammer is “really unique, maybe very unique in the viral adoption model. You can throw the words ‘enterprise’ and ‘social’ on a bunch of different stuff, but you can’t find anybody [else] that has really built a customer base of enterprise IT customers, virally–with great respect from the IT department and with great love from the customers. I think Yammer is very unique in that.”