Social media and networking really infiltrated the enterprise world in 2011, and one company that can really exemplify that is Yammer.
The Facebook-like platform for business employees tripled year-over-year sales in 2011 as it grew to a user base of more than 4 million corporate members.
The customer base now consists of approximately 200,000 subscribing businesses, and 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies are said to be using Yammer networks within their organizations, including huge corporations such as Chevron and General Electric.
Yammer's CEO and founder David Sacks remarked in a statement that it wasn't only Yammer that had a successful start in 2011, but the social enterprise concept and budding industry overall.
2011 was the year that Enterprise Social Networking gained mainstream acceptance. When Yammer first launched, the industry viewed the idea of bringing social networking into the enterprise with skepticism.
Now the trend is regarded as inevitable, with ESN becoming an official software category and C-level executives at Fortune 500 companies leading social initiatives to drive transformation in their organizations.
Certainly, interest in collaboration software and technology as well as cloud computing must have also tied into this as all of these concepts go hand-in-hand at some point.
Nevertheless, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff must be pleased too.
- Box adds enterprise-grade security features, Intel integration
- Google Apps extends support to Podio collaboration platform
- Yammer gets more social with new Ticker, Pages, Files features
- Oracle acquires RightNow for $1.5 billion, aims turrets at Salesforce.com
- Microsoft’s next CRM Online update to add Chatter-like activity feeds