Microsoft on Monday confirmed its rumored $1.2 billion acquisition of B2B social networking firm Yammer.
Yammer will join the Microsoft Office Division, which is led by division president Kurt DelBene, according to Microsoft. The team will continue to report to current CEO David Sacks. Microsoft added that Yammer will bolster its growing portfolio of cloud services.
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Reports of Microsoft's intended acquisition have been kicking around for the past two weeks since Sarah Taylor, an administrative manager at Ignition Talent Group, tweeted that she overheard the rumor from at the Creamery, a café across the street from Yammer's San Francisco office.
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The reported deal comes after some very recent industry consolidation. Over the past month, Salesforce.com bought Buddy Media for $689 million on June 4 and Oracle bought Vitrue for $300 million on May 23.
Launched in 2008, Yammer provides a Facebook-like platform for businesses that lets employees post news and links and ask questions. Using a model of providing a basic version of its software to bait users into stepping up to premium, Yammer built a successful business, snagging 80% of the Fortune 500 by October 2010. In February, Yammer raised $85 million in a fifth round of funding led by Daper Fisher Jurvetson that gave the company an implied value of $1 billion.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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