Yammer chatter steals Saleforce's show

It was somewhat ironic that despite nearly 6,000 people mobilising in Sydney for a major Salesforce conference on Thursday it was Yammer that was trending on Twitter, not Salesforce.

While the Commonwealth Bank's Andy Lark was on stage at Cloudforce explaining to the audience why the bank "chose the better platform" for enterprise social collaboration, rumours were swirling that Yammer had been sold to Microsoft for more than $1 billion.

Yammer is an enterprise social network that was launched in 2008 as a Twitter-like tool for employees of large companies. Today it boasts more than four million users with 15,000 Australian companies on the network, and in March it expanded its Australian operation on the back of relationships with local companies including Deloitte and AMP. Yammer has also been used by staff within the Commonwealth Bank, but it's now clear senior management have decided to favour salesforce.com's Chatter tool.

The major challenges for Yammer have always been getting users off its free service to upgrade to the paid version, and ensuring Yammer integrates with the myriad collaboration platforms already in place in large organisations. One such platform is Microsoft SharePoint, which lacks social features, but which Yammer moved to integrate with formally in 2010. More recently Yammer also integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

At an innovation panel at Thursday's conference salesforce.com cofounder Parker Harris said Chatter, which is Salesforce's answer to Yammer, was an innovation that came from the company's marketing department, and that when it came up there was some conflict inside the company as to whether it was worth pursuing.

"We moved a ton of researchers into Chatter away from things that were completely valid and where everyone was doing a great job...It took a lot of guts to do that," said Harris.

But at the time, Yammer CEO David Sacks argued Chatter was a straight copy of Yammer, and that salesforce.com chief Marc Benioff, who was a judge at the TechCrunch50 competition won by Yammer in 2008, loved it so much he simply directed his team to build their own version.

"Benioff having been a judge at TC50 is the reason there is a Chatter," Sacks told WebProNews when Chatter was launched in February last year.

"He raved about Yammer at the time and now he's trying to copy it."

But 15 months on, Salesforce appears to have made strong inroads against Yammer, largely as a result of Marc Benioff's vision for the social enterprise - which is much more holistic than just Twitter for companies.

Forrester's CIO group principal analyst John Brand says the social enterprise is not the latest trend, but an inevitable evolution in companies embedding the concepts of social computing into the way the organisation operates.

"The social enterprise is not just an organisation that is social media aware, that engages with its customers, that listens through social media analysis - they are certainly components of the social enterprise, but what were finding is organisations are thinking about social enterprise as part of the way they do business, it's not a marketing only function," says Brand.

For example, the Commonwealth Bank is using Chatter to help staff collaborate on loan requests.

"If you look at the integration of that social tool set across the enterprise what Chatter enables is this ability for the narrative of the business to be captured and shared and for people to turn every communication into a social communication on their own device - that is enormously powerful," says Commonwealth Bank chief marketing officer Andy Lark.

If Forrester's John Brand is right and enterprises are destined to use more social tools as opposed to the straight IT collaboration tools of old, then Microsoft is already behind. 

Buying Yammer is a step in the right direction, but Microsoft will first have to convince a pool of savvy developers to work in a .net environment.  That might ultimately lead to many ending up at Salesforce, and as always the internet copy machine would roll on