Yammer, originally conceived as the ‘twitter for the enterprise’ has expanded its social networking functionality to look more like a ‘facebook for the enterprise’.
Yammer, which launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, is launching the next-gen version of its platform today. Aiming to be a full-fledged social network for the enterprise, Yammer 2.0 is being released today at TechCrunch Disrupt. As we wrote in our initial review of the new platform, Yammer is adding a number of applications to its platform that increases its functionality beyond just a communications platform.
Of course they are not the only one to be inspired by facebook (see Marc Benioff and salesforce’s chatter). This category is really crowded. Besides yammer and chatter, there are players such a jive software, cisco’s quad, social text, cube tree (part of success factor) to just name a few. Enterprise vendors such as oracle and SAP also have similar products.
I see this social software for the enterprise as part of a broader collaboration product category. So you will see current collaboration suites using a bundling strategy to to gain market share against the current market leaders such as jive and yammer both of which are excellent acquisition candidates.