Yammer and SharePoint and… Dynamics ? Oh my!

Wow.  And you thought we were done!  This afternoon, it feels like I’ve spent half the day keeping tabs on the conversation around Microsoft’s Yammer acquisition and its implications for enterprise social networking.  And for good reason– this is big news.  You can already find my own thoughts on the topic, both in terms of what questions Microsoft needs to answer next and specifically what it means for on-premise SharePoint customers.
In the wake of the news, one very popular topic around the web has been the potential synergy not just with SharePoint, but even moreso with Dynamics CRM and whether or not that’s even the right strategy for Microsoft to pursue.  That has some merit, given that Salesforce.com is actually a line of business tool, and integrating social with real, actionable data has worked for them.  Microsoft’s social has thus far been tied to the productivity space, which has also worked well– but isn’t necessarily tied immediately into line of business activity.  If they can take on SalesForce there, it opens up a whole new revenue stream for Redmond.
Let’s take a look at what some other folks are saying.  Rob Koplowitz at Forrester lays the groundwork for the acquisition that we should all be aware of– and tells us why something like this was inevitable:

Microsoft has been slow to the game in enterprise social. Their primary delivery mechanism, SharePoint, is a very big product with a traditionally long delivery cycle. When you upgrade your enterprise social story every 3-4 years, you’re going to be constantly behind in a market segment that is rewarded for being forward thinking. Hence, they’ve not been a thought leader. So, if you have gobs and gobs of cash, what do you do? Buy an undeniable thought leader. And Yammer is that.

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I agree, which is why I’m constantly making bad jokes about waiting for Oracle to snap up Jive Software.  With that out of the way, the main body of Mr. Koplowitz’s post gets into some very interesting theorizing about who is driving the acquisition, and why.  He uses the analogy of the movie “Sliding Doors” (or what well-read sci-fi geeks call the Butterfly Effect) to consider potential futures for the acquisition.
Of particular note, Mr. Koplowitz raises the spectre of SalesForce and Microsoft’s own constant push for its competing CRM package.  This is something we haven’t addressed here, but it’s nearly as viable a thought as Yammer being gobbled up by the Office Division.  Mr. Koplowitz addresses both potential scenarios as minor fails, before outlining key ideas about how Microsoft should make it work.

Here is what Microsoft needs to do to make this work:

• Keep Yammer largely autonomous.
• Keep Yammer a pure SaaS play.
• Fulfill the vision of a service.

Check out the full post for his detailed extrapolation on each.
Meanwhile, Larry Dignan at ZDNet takes a different approach— and I find his wholehearted skepticism to be somewhat refreshing.
Referring to the recent spate of social acquisitions as a “land grab” of “social enterprise lunacy”, Mr. Dignan puts into writing the same sort of critical reaction that I’ve been feeling myself.  Citing a number of reputable sources, Mr. Dignan asks the same question that many people I know have been quietly wondering:

Microsoft may be spending more than $1 billion on a social UI for SharePoint. Couldn’t one of Microsoft’s many skunkworks teams build a SharePoint activity stream that can compete?

I’m wondering if the answer to this lies in cloud enablement and Yammer’s reported one-million-strong existing customer base (credit to Mr. Koplowitz for that number).  Going back to Groove and continuing through Skype and now Yammer, Microsoft has long shown us that it prefers a buy-versus-build strategy when it comes to keeping on top of collaborative technology.  There’s no doubt that they can innovate on their own, but there’s some value to be had in buying someone else’s innovation when it comes along with a ready-made revenue stream.
Oh, and one that could either plug into your existing cloud infrastructure, help your fledgling CRM product take on a market leader, or better… both.