Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yammer confirmed today that it is laying off some of its marketing and sales staff, seven months after the company was acquired by Microsoft.

Yammer provides a software as a service product that businesses use to collaborate inside their own social network. The collaboration tool was snapped up by Microsoft in July, though the parent company has kept the technology to continue running instead of shutting it down and absorbing Yammer’s employees.

“We can confirm that Yammer eliminated a small number of sales and marketing positions. Each of our businesses continually assesses and reallocates resources to align with their priorities,” said a spokesperson in a statement emailed to VentureBeat. “Yammer has continued to grow rapidly since becoming part of the Microsoft Office Division.”

The company, which recently opened a new office to house its employees, is likely just trimming off the extra fat after its acquisition. Microsoft already has large sales force, and it can likely handle adding Yammer to its stable of products to push. And Microsoft certainly can support any new marketing efforts.

It also sounds like the company is continuing to hire in its other departments, which means we’re likely not seeing a decline in the value of the product.

hat tip TechCrunch; Yammer image via Robert Scoble/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — What if you could have all of your employees, cloud applications, documents, files, and customer data in one place? Sounds impossible, as the cloud is split up between a bunch of different applications and companies, but Zeppelin (yes, its URL really does have 3 p’s) thinks it can actually capture them all in a jar.

“Tools like Yammer, Jive, SharePoint, all those tools that are promising to be the next Facebook or Twitter for your business… once they’re installed inside a company, they just sit there empty,” said co-founder Anze Vodovnik at the DEMO Conference today. “It’s like a blank piece of paper. Very powerful, but underused.”

Zeppelin lets employees put quick blurbs about their day in front of coworkers. It connects with Google Analytics, Basecamp, Microsoft, and customer relationship management systems, and allows employees to upload files and photos. You can also sign up for a daily or weekly summary of what is happening on your team.

The company launched its private beta today. Right now, Zeppelin is only going after the small to medium-sized business market.

“I wonder about outside of Silicon Valley, do people really care about GitHub … being integrated into their collaboration suite?” said Ross Fubini, investor with Kapor Capital, in a panel discussion after Zeppelin’s presentation.

The competitors are real as well: Zeppelin is also up against customer relationship manager Salesforce and its Yammer competitor Chatter. Yammer considers itself the business social network and acts a lot like the Facebook newsfeed. Employees can contribute quick updates in a Yammer stream as well as upload photos, files and add links. It is possible to hook up Google documents, and the company recently bought OneDrum to integrate Microsoft Office to your Yammer groups.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise social networking player Moxie Software has updated its signature Spaces software suite so it integrates customer responses with employee collaboration into a single offering, the company announced Wednesday morning.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Moxie faces strong competition from Jive Software, Yammer, and Salesforce’s Chatter. Even with so many companies fighting for the business social network spotlight, it still had a major year in 2011, with the addition of 75 new customers and a boost in recurring revenues by 40 percent.

As it grows and fights the competition, Moxie has to keep its software up-to-date and ahead of the curve. The latest version of Spaces tries to accomplish this by providing more ways to interact with customers through your in-house business social network.

“The biggest challenge CEOs face today is getting their enterprises closer to their customers,” Moxie CEO Tom Kelly said in a statement. “To provide real benefits, enterprise social technology must deliver real customer value. Our suite makes it easier for organizations to find and deliver the right answer to customers through their channel of choice.”

The two big feature additions to the new version Spaces are Expert Connect and Spaces Connect. Expert Connect enables “cross-departmental collaboration for Customer Service and Support, IT, HR and Sales and Marketing to ensure accurate and efficient customer communications across channels.” Spaces Connect, on the other hand, allows for a “comprehensive integration framework with secure APIs and pre-built connectors” and integration with Moxie apps like CRM, ERP, Content Management, HR, and more.

The new version of Spaces will be available to all Moxie customers by the end of March.

Moxie has also provided an infographic showing the state of business collaboration tools and the intersection with customers, which you can check out below:

Business network photo: violetkaipa/Shutterstock

Vice President of Product Marketing Sean Whiteley said Chatter has already become Salesforce’s “most successful product release ever.” More than 20,000 companies are using it. And some of them are buying Chatter on its own, rather than as a free add-on for Salesforce’s sales and customer service tools — for example, Whiteley said Reed Exhibitions has 1,000 Chatter-only users, while Hitachi has 2,000.

One of the big questions around social networking for a company or a team is whether it’s just a toy, or if it actually helps employees get work done. Salesforce surveyed its users, and it says that the average company on Chatter is reporting impressive gains, including a 10 percent increase in productivity, a 25 percent increase in collaboration, and 13 percent decrease in email.

Still, Chatter users have been demanding a bunch of new features, Whiteley said. Salesforce already addressed one of those requests earlier this month with the launch of Chatter mobile apps, but it’s answering even more requests with today’s announcement of Chatter 2, which should be available in October. The new features include a desktop application built using Adobe’s AIR technology, automated suggestions of other employees to follow and groups to find, search capabilities, an email digest of Chatter activity, and more.