The rumors were true: Microsoft is indeed buying business-centric social networking site Yammer for $1.2 billion, or $200 million more than early rumors indicated. A presumably pleased Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a prepared statement that “the acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love” and that “Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services.” Buying Yammer gives Microsoft a strong social networking component to its ubiquitous Office suite since Microsoft now inherits more than 5 million Yammer users across more than 200,000 different companies. In fact, Microsoft is strongly touting Yammer’s ability to mesh with its other services, noting that it “plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.”
