Enterprise social network Tibbr has had a strong emphasis on mobile access for some time but today it has taken another step forward with newly designed apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry 10.

Tibbr is the enterprise social networking solution made by Tibco, the 15-year-old $3.5 billion enterprise software company. It competes against solutions Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software, Salesforce’s Chatter, and Moxie. Tibbr now serves more than 1.5 million paid users across 157 companies.

It makes sense to see Tibco push Tibbr’s mobile capabilities to a new level, especially in light of competitors like Chatter upping its mobile game recently.

Ram Menon, president of Tibco’s social computing division, told VentureBeat the new apps are about making sure workers have access to the service and collaboration tools no matter where they are. Even in the office or at home with computers nearby, many workers want the flexibility to respond and check feeds on their smartphones and tablets.

“Mobile has always been our strong point,” Menon said. “We want to make it easy to see what’s happening in your network. Irrespective of device we’ve got you covered.”

The new apps are all unified with a similar design and feature sets. Each app takes advantage of Tibbr’s “Enterprise Social Graph” to make sure employees see people’s updates and important documents. Through integrated apps, you can even edit and open documents from other services from within Tibbr. For example, if someone in your feed has posted a document from Box, you can tap on it and it will open the file in the Box app. Menon said the apps only do this with apps like Box, Salesforce, Oracle, and SharePoint, but Tibco plans to add more.

Two other handy features in Tibbr’s mobile apps are called “Links” and “Files.” In the top photo, which shows the iPad version of the Tibbr, you can see these sections of the screen near the top. Menon said “Links” and “Files” give a strong visual representation of what the content has been shared on your network.

Take a look at what the iPhone version looks like the photos below.

Photo via Tibbr

Look up. Those are upcoming Microsoft logos — as strange as it may seem.

They’re new designs for Bing (left) and another Microsoft product (either Yammer or Skype), part of Microsoft’s overall effort to re-imagine itself, reports the Verge.

Clearly, Microsoft is aiming for the same flat design we see in its new Windows and Office logos — and that’s a good thing. The new logos feel cleaner and more modern than Microsoft’s previous designs, and the change shows the software giant isn’t afraid to try something different.

The new designs were a part of a presentation by Windows Phone design student manager Albert Shum and Todd Simmons, who’s the creative director at Wolff Olins, for a recent Design Day event in Norway. The pair discussed Microsoft’s efforts to revamp its design identity. Simmons also points out that Xbox, Bing, and Skype will see new logos soon.

According to the Verge, the pair discussed how Microsoft paid particular attention to certain brands like Nike when considering the company’s own redesign efforts.

“When you experience the Nike brand in whatever form you may experience it, there’s always a ‘Nikeness’ right … you can certainly see it without the logo,” Simmons said. That seems to be the goal of Microsoft’s new logos — they’ll still be distinct, but on a certain level you’ll be able to tell they’re Microsoft products.

A video of the presentation was initially put online at Vimeo, but unfortunately it looks like it’s been made private.

McPherson, whose LinkedIn profile still shows her at Yammer, led marketing at that company for the past three years. Prior to that she was a partner at the Horn Group, a PR firm, and a senior vice president at Ogilvy PR. She also spent three years as a director of public relations at PeopleSoft.

“Dee Anna is a dream fit — she put enterprise social networking on the map at Yammer and will help HootSuite continue to expand its penetration into social enterprises,” HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes said in a statement.

Among her accomplishments at Yammer were the acquisition of the company by Microsoft for $1.2 billion and a healthy 300 percent annual growth rate.

HootSuite, which recently became one of only a handful of Twitter Ad API partners, took some steps closer to inside-the-company Yammer territory last year with its Conversations feature. This hire, however, is almost certainly not about HootSuite becoming more Yammer-like but about HootSuite continuing its growth inside large enterprises. Seventy-nine of the Fortune 100 already use HootSuite, but there’s a lot of room to grow deeper and broader.

Source: LinkedIn

Dee Anna McPherson

“I’m thrilled to join HootSuite during a period of such incredible growth,” said McPherson in a rather predictable PR-speak quote. “There’s no position I’d rather be in than heading up a talented team working to cement an innovative product at the head of the pack for enterprise social media management.”

One question: Where will she work?

McPherson is San Francisco-based, while HootSuite is Vancouver-based. HootSuite does have a San Francisco office but has indicated in the past that it has no intention of moving senior staff. That said, all of its top people spend time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley regularly, and it would not be unusual for McPherson to simply reverse that trend, working in San Francisco while occasionally visiting Vancouver.

One quick tip for the long-time PR pro: How about a LinkedIn photo sans redeye?

HootSuite continues to grow both users and headcount, with over six million users and now 250 employees, up from just 70 at the start of last year.

photo credit: Blue Genie Art via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When IBM bought Lotus for $3.5 billion in 1995, it looked as though the venerable computing giant was just about to lock up the software industry and coast to unstoppable profits.

Eighteen years later, Lotus looks more like a millstone around IBM’s neck than a flywheel giving it extra speed.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, in advance of IBM’s Q4 earnings release today, Lotus was the weakest performer in IBM’s software portfolio, shedding 6.4 percent of its sales volume in the first nine months of 2012.

It probably accounts for about $1 billion in annual revenue, according to estimates sourced by the WSJ, or one-sixth to one-fifth of IBM’s overall software business.

Ironically, Lotus once led the way toward today’s hottest enterprise technologies, the collaborative software that helps teams communicate and work together on projects. One of the success stories of that niche is Yammer, which Microsoft acquired last year for $1.2 billion. So, why is IBM sitting at the back of the pack instead of leading from the front?

Lotus, which made the first blockbuster “killer app” in the 1980s (Lotus 1-2-3, a phenomenally successful spreadsheet program), went on to create Lotus Notes, a powerful groupware suite that came out in the early 1990s before anyone had any idea what “groupware” was.

I used it extensively at several companies I worked with. Initially, it was mysterious and powerful. Like most end-users of Lotus Notes, I used it primarily as an email program. It had its quirks, but it worked. But there was another dimension to Notes, a powerful, programmable backend that let you create databases and workspaces for collaborative work, contact management, information sharing, and communication.

Today, we’d call it a collaboration tool or a corporate social-media tool, and it would be web-based and standards-compliant, like Yammer, Jive, and Huddle. In the absence of standards, Notes’ engineers had to invent everything themselves, making it a clever but proprietary solution.

But long before those web-based startups came along, Notes was already losing its cool. The client software became huge and bloated. It was expensive to implement and difficult to customize.

As the Internet gained popularity in the late 1990s, Lotus added standards, like POP3 and IMAP email interfaces. They didn’t do so well with the standards department, however, driving anyone who had to use an Internet mail client with a Lotus Notes mail server absolutely insane.

The upshot is that, just as the Internet became widely used, Lotus Notes became annoying and out of date.

Sure, it was still powerful, but unlocking the power of Notes often required specialist knowledge, giving rise to a sector of Notes consultants. No surprise that these consultants are having a hard time getting taken seriously today. The WSJ quotes a Notes consultant who complains about his reception:

“I go to a party, and I almost immediately get insulted,” says Eugen Tarnow, a director of the consultancy Avalon Business Systems, which sells the aging email software to businesses. “They say, ‘Lotus Notes, that’s still around?’ It’s no fun.”

Unfortunately, IBM’s engineers realized the importance of standards compliance too late and didn’t bake interoperability into Lotus Notes well enough or early enough. So, as powerful as Notes could be, it was and is ill-prepared to work in today’s API-rich cloud environment.

IBM has more modern social-media software, too, but only makes about $55 million per year from that segment of its business. So the challenge for IBM is to continue milking as much revenue as it can from Lotus, while gradually shifting the branding and the revenue to newer, sexier lines of business. One example: Renaming its annual Lotus conference, Lotusphere, as “Connect2013.” Yeah, that’ll help.

We’ll be watching to see if the earnings report sheds any more light on IBM’s efforts to turn Notes around. But as for me, I’m not holding my breath.

Photo credit: Andrew Mason via photopin cc

You’re the chief executive of NewsGator, a key Microsoft partner in enterprise social software. You’ve just been named a Microsoft Globally Managed Partner. And both of your key product lines contain the words “for SharePoint” in their names.

Yeah, that’s the software most industry execs think Microsoft is going to integrate Yammer into. Yammer, of course, being Microsoft’s new billion-dollar toy in the enterprise social space. And SharePoint being exactly what you’ve built your entire solution on top of.

Uh oh.

Source: NewsGator

JB Holston

If you’re like most people, you might think: bug, meet windshield. Most people, however, are not CEOs of major corporations. Or have raised almost $40 million in capital. Or have four million paid users. Most people, not to put too fine a point on it, are not JB Holston.

“A couple of their very senior people called me on Monday,” Holston told VentureBeat. They warned him about the deal before the speculation was confirmed, and tried to soften the blow.

The Microsoft execs told Holston that NewsGator should not be worried, for four reasons.

“They said to me, ‘First, we think these guys have cracked the code for the freemium model … we didn’t buy it for your existing customers. Second, you’re a really critical enterprise partner of ours, and for the long haul. Third, you as an ISV (Microsoft-speak for independent, i.e., non-Microsoft software vendor) should think of Yammer as another platform in the Microsoft arsenal that you can leverage going forward.’”

Finally, they told Holston that the acquisition was not meant meant to imply that they were going to stop doing anything they were otherwise doing.

When Holston caught his breath after the call, he realized several things.

“On our software roadmaps we always assume that certain social capabilities are going to get commoditized. For example, Salesforce bought Chatter, mostly to give it away. What we’ve been focusing on is moving up the value add chain.”

And, from a NewsGator perspective, Yammer is mostly departmental software: not a big enough solution for truly enterprise customers. NewsGator’s focus, Holston told VentureBeat, is Fortune 2000 companies. These are huge multinational corporations with tens and hundreds of thousands of employees.

“Yammer is not a competitor in the space where companies have 180,000 people, they’re multinational, and they need the software in German. If it’s not in German, it’s a non-starter.”

And it’s not just about the product or the localizations; it’s about the sales model, the service model, and the implementation approach.

“For the class of customer we deal with our two competitors and IBM and Jive,” Holston says. “It’s not just a product but a whole service approach. For example, an IBM can go to a company and say, ‘we’ve had hundreds of thousands of people on this solution for years; here’s how we can do it for you.’”

So ultimately, although perhaps a shock, Holston is not worried, as he mentioned in a post on the company blog. NewsGator is a different class of product with a different class of customer. In fact, he feels, Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer is a good thing for NewsGator. It keeps NewsGator’s focus on enterprise-class clients, and it keeps Microsoft’s internal focus on lower-end, lower-value, smaller clients.

“If it’s going to mean that Microsoft is going to more on its own … that gives us greater runway,” Holston said. “In fact, Yammer has been a great lead source for us already.

And the integration question? Will Microsoft integrate Yammer and SharePoint?

“My honest answer is that whatever it means it doesn’t mean they’ll take the Yammer code and integrate it with SharePoint,” Holston told VentureBeat. “They’re not going to shove two completely different code-bases together.”

Instead, he feels, there will be an Office 365 integration first, and probably a tie-in to Microsoft’s cloud offerings to compete with Google+.

“Any other relationship with SharePoint per se is unimaginable to me — it would be faster for MS to just write one on their own than to try to port one to their other  – and Microsoft has said they won’t do this.”

NewsGator’s competitors seem to agree, or at least Jive. Holston said that Jive thinks the Yammer acquisition is a great thing. For IBM he wasn’t so sure.

“For IBM a shoe has dropped … but I think they’re looking for the other one in the closet,” Holston said.

Presumably that would not be Microsoft’s closet.

Image source: ShutterStock

[ Updated with new comments as they come in ... most recently at 4:01 PM PST, June 27 ]

Note: we’ve added a full interview with NewsGator CEO JB Holston, a Microsoft partner in the enterprise social space, building its solutions on SharePoint. He’s got some great observations.

Yesterday, after half a month of speculation, Microsoft announced that it has purchased Yammer for $1.2 billion. According to Charles River Partners, the first venture capital firm to invest in Yammer, that’s the second largest all-cash deal for a VC-backed company, ever.

VentureBeat has been reaching out to industry sources — and the original Yammer investor, George Zachary — asking what this deal means for the enterprise social market. Here’s what we’re hearing:

Scott Raskin, chief executive of MindJet, a social collaboration platform that integrates with SharePoint:

“When Microsoft steps up to the plate with a deal this large, you know the category is gaining serious traction. The Yammer acquisition represents new validation for easy to use, integrated social collaboration: both for employees and across the enterprise value chain. This brings the market one step closer to adopting more effective and complete collaboration solutions for taking ideas and executing upon them.”

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and chief executive of eXo, an enterprise portal platform

The fact that Microsoft is purchasing Yammer clearly means three things:

First, that SharePoint has failed to deliver the enterprise social capabilities that organizations are increasingly demanding.

Second, that Yammer has been very successful at attracting individual users, but they’ve continued to struggle at the enterprise level, where IT organizations still have legitimate concerns about security, integration and manageability.

Third, that Microsoft is willing to spend 1.2 billion dollars to play catch-up in this space. Yammer may enable Microsoft to offer a freemium social service, but it’s going to have a hard time cost-effectively attaching SharePoint to that service because Yammer is multi-tenant and SharePoint is not. They’ll sort out the integration eventually, but probably not quickly.

Malcolm Ross, VP of product marketing at Appian, a business process management company

As the Twitter joke goes … Yammer to Microsoft is “SharePoint Cloud Server 2012 Mobile Enterprise Social Networking Edition.” It evolves SharePoint past the age of the Portal and into Enterprise Social Networking.

The companies that are truly threatened by this acquisition are companies like Teligent and NewsGator, who have created a lucrative business filling the social networking hole in Microsoft SharePoint.  As mentioned earlier, Yammer simply fills in the obvious cracks in SharePoint.  It fails to connect social collaboration and sharing with meaningful work context in an enterprise.

The end-user will ultimately have one platform for sharing and collaboration (SharePoint/Yammer) and another where real work gets done (ERP, CRM, BI, etc). Yammer in no way begins to bridge these worlds of structured enterprise processes with collaboration.

Tim Young, VP of social enterprise at VMware (which recently acquired Yammer competitor Socialcast)

It’s clear that across a variety of industries, social is here to stay. VMware recognized this trend early on and acquired Socialcast more than a year ago — since then, many other companies have followed our lead. Today’s news is yet another proof point that social is becoming a critical and core component in the way that employees work.

Vineet Jain, chief executive of Egnyte, a cloud file server

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer is a clear indicator that cloud and collaboration solutions are an assumed part of the enterprise landscape.

With this complete embrace of the cloud, we can move on to the more important question of where enterprise files live, and what are the best deployment models for integrating the cloud into a larger data strategy.  It’s in this larger picture that we begin to understand that a hybrid cloud approach is the one that makes the most sense for the enterprise.

They are able to maintain the physical sensation of “touching” their data on premise, while leveraging the cloud for certain applications.  Over the coming months, the integration of Yammer and social collaboration tools with hybrid cloud data and file strategies will propel businesses into ever more efficient models of doing business.

Alastair Mitchell, cofounder and chief executive of Huddle (a Yammer competitor)

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer is the latest in a wave of high-profile acquisitions and consolidations in the social software space. We’ve already seen VMware acquire Socialcast, Jive Software snap up Offisync, Oracle scoop up Collective Intellect, and Yammer purchase OneDrum. And these represent just a small snapshot of activity over the last few years.

The Microsoft/Yammer deal provides further validation of the increasing importance of enterprise social software. Technology that supports the new ways in which people are sharing information and working together is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for businesses, it’s vital. Companies that fail to use innovative social and mobile tools to make the best use of information in today’s knowledge economy will simply get left behind their competitors.

By buying up social enterprise vendors, technology goliaths such as Microsoft and Oracle have obviously woken up to the fact that this really is the future of working. They are now racing to plug the gaps in their own social offerings so that they can respond to increasing demand from businesses and government organizations alike.

Richard Edwards, principal analyst at Ovum

Many employees at the junior (and now senior) end of the workforce live aspects of their personal lives through Facebook and Twitter, so the idea of introducing similar kinds of tools into the workplace seems to make sense from a communication and collaboration point of view. It’s not just Microsoft eyeing-up the opportunities afforded by the Facebook-led social paradigm shift. Established enterprise IT vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAP, are all busy bringing social capabilities to the workplace via a variety of ways and means.

Microsoft already has a product that touts social capabilities – SharePoint Server, but this was designed and built in the pre-Facebook, pre-cloud era. Launched in 2008, Yammer is a new breed of enterprise collaboration solution, designed from the ground up to exploit social, mobile, and cloud technologies, and would sit neatly alongside Skype, the communication product that Microsoft acquired this time last year for $8.5 billion.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer will undoubtedly have an opportunity impact at the commodity end of the enterprise social networking spectrum, but if Google and LinkedIn can address this aspect of the market with a compelling proposition, then all is still to play for.

Mark Eisenberg, director at Fino, a cloud and mobile application services firm

Yammer is a good addition to the Microsoft portfolio. Microsoft’s organic additions to the Office suite, such as MySites in SharePoint, have not gained the traction hoped for and are lacking in the robust features social networking users expect today.

SharePoint is the likely center of gravity for the Yammer platform. The mature integration to SharePoint has to be very appealing.  In addition, the reach into the broad spectrum of platforms supported by Yammer will be a huge boost to Microsoft’s social networking ambitions in the enterprise. SharePoint needs to grow beyond its repository roots, and Yammer can make that happen.

Microsoft’s enterprise social networking story has not been resonating to date.  And Salesforce has been making considerable hay in the social networking sun.  This should put them back on equal footing.

Avinoam Nowogrodski, co-founder and CEO of Clarizen, a cloud-based project management solution

As enterprises continue to become increasingly collaborative through new business processes, we only expect the concept of the social enterprise to rise in popularity.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer best exemplifies that the interest in the social enterprise will continue as business decision makers look to match the right tools with organizational needs. In fact, solutions are adapting to better serve employee needs, and we have seen our customers paying closer attention to which solutions are best suited for their employees, clients, and customers.

… As a result, you will see companies, including Clarizen, looking to fortify their leadership in the social enterprise space with continual innovation and resources put into rapidly updating software to fulfill customers’ requests and expectations. … In the end, this creates a more collaborative and efficient ecosystem.

Do you have a perspective you’d like to share?

Let us know – email me, or add it in the comments below!

Image credit: ShutterStock

VentureBeat talked to George Zachary of Charles River Ventures about how the deal happened and what the future might hold for Yammer. Charles Rivers is the venture capital firm that led Yammer’s original $5 million funding in January 2009 and participated in three of the following four investment rounds.

“Microsoft approached Yammer in the first quarter of this year,” Zachary told VentureBeat while taking a brief break from his vacation in the Caribbean. ”They saw the growth rate of the user base and that Yammer had gotten a lot of love from users.”

After initial contact earlier in the year, nothing significant happened for several months, until May. Then negotiations got serious very quickly, said Zachary, who is also on Yammer’s board of directors.

“We didn’t talk to anyone else,” Zachary said. “They put down an offer and we accepted it.”

The founders of Yammer, chief executive David Sacks and chief technical officer Adam Pisoni, were both in favor of selling.

“We asked the founders what they wanted to do, and they wanted to do the deal. So we did it.”

Zachary was both cautious and bold when speculating where Yammer might end up within Microsoft’s offerings. “I’m not privy to Microsoft’s plans, and I’m sure they’d prefer I didn’t talk about it, but if I had to speculate, I would guess that Yammer will supersede SharePoint.”

That fits with the company’s original vision, Zachary said, since Yammer’s goal was always to build the world’s best intranet. And it fits with the corporate oversight that Microsoft is at least initially instituting: Yammer will report to the SharePoint group.

Zachary said the acquisition will help Microsoft solidify and grow its $18 billion annual revenue stream from the enterprise market:

“Microsoft learned from both Facebook and Twitter that they need to be more social. Outlook and SharePoint are both a little dated. The future of messaging is not going to be Outlook.”

Having Yammer sets Microsoft up well to compete in the enterprise social market with the likes of Jive and Chatter, said Zachary. When asked about IBM Connections, which IDC recently highlighted in the enterprise social market as having over $100 million in revenue, he was blunt.

“When IBM says they’re the biggest enterprise social network provider, I think they’re lying, and I’m happy to be quoted on that. It’s like Nokia saying they’re leading the smartphone market. Really, they’re so far behind in product and architecture.”

(See IBM’s response below.)

The reason that Microsoft was a great fit? ”The end destination for Yammer is integration with email. The world’s biggest enterprise email company is Microsoft.”

Zachary wanted to publicly thank the founders of Yammer, Sacks, and Pisoni, for their key role in growing the company.

“There’s a world of investors out there trying to differentiate themselves and the value they bring, but it always comes down to the founders.”

VentureBeat reached out to IBM for a response on Zachary’s comment about the enterprise social market. Here’s the answer we received from Karen Lilla, manager external relations:

Look at what the leading analysts are saying. Last week, leading analyst firm IDC unveiled its analysis of the top enterprise social software vendors in the market: IBM was #1, Yammer was #8. IBM grew faster than its competitors and nearly two times faster than the overall market. For three consecutive years (2009, 2010, 2011), IDC ranked IBM number one in worldwide market share for enterprise social software.

IBM is the only vendor that can deliver the breadth of social business solutions that include social analytics and content management; across private and public clouds, and on a wide range of mobile devices, giving customers the maximum flexibility based on their preference.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Please note, the opinions expressed here are the individuals’ own.

Aaron Fulkerson, who runs MindTouch, a social help system and knowledge base said that this was a much-needed move by Microsoft. Fulkerson worked at Microsoft until 2003 as a program manager, reporting to chief strategy officer Craig Mundie. He said the acquisition is an important one from Microsoft’s perspective:

Microsoft has been deluding itself into believing SharePoint plays in the social space, arguably the most important market in software in the last decade … acquiring Yammer will make them relevant.

Having Yammer as part of MS SharePoint would mean finally delivering on the demands of the many many millions of disgruntled and frustrated SharePoint users … Furthermore, Yammer as part of MS Dynamics would create a highly competitive offering in the Social CRM space that would undoubtedly put pressure on Salesforce.com. The ‘winners’ in industry would be Microsoft SharePoint and Dynamics users, as well as Jive Software, who would continue to receive a halo effect on their stock price.

And in terms of winners and losers? Fulkerson says Microsoft is a winner, but other enterprise social players are losers:

This would, of course, have a profoundly negative impact on the dozens of point social applications playing in the social intranet ecosystem and relegate them to the dead pool or even more niche plays.

Yammer could be used as a giveaway to get buyers onto Microsoft SharePoint and Dynamics. This will really put a hurting on other, smaller, vendors [such as] Jive.

Frankly, this would make Microsoft relevant in the social space. Relevance is something Microsoft could use more of.

Ram Menon, president of social computing at Tibco, heads up a competing product in the enterprise social networking space, Tibbr. Tibbr is used in Shell, Macy’s, and KPMG, among other companies. He damns Yammer with faint praise and doesn’t seem to think much of it as a future-looking technology:

I laud Yammer investors for extracting an outstanding return on their investment. Given Yammer’s freemium  model and the product issues they faced scaling for true enterprise-class deployment, this presents a graceful exit from what could have been an uphill road over the next couple years.

Menon isn’t a fan of Yammer’s approach of adding a social layer on top of existing technologies:

Companies continue to be bombarded with vendors offering a social layer to every product they provide — adding social to ERP, HR, CRM, etc. seems to be the flavor of the moment. And the question that users tend to ask is, do I buy a social channel for every application I use or can I buy just one TV that runs all channels that allows employees to get work done?

Lawrence Coburn, founder and CEO of DoubleDutch, a mobile enterprise app builder in the collaboration and sharing space, said he’s happy for the Yammer team but pessimistic about the long-term results:

We’re really happy for those guys — their distribution has been very good, and Microsoft makes a lot of sense for them. I think it’s a good match.

I think it was a good idea to get out now, because mobile is going to eat enterprise collaboration’s lunch, and Yammer is very much a desktop-first service.

Let us know in the comments what you think of Microsoft’s Yammer buy.

BusinessInsider broke the rumor an hour ago, and Bloomberg said two sources confirmed that there are acquisition talks. CNet is reporting as well, but notes that the chatter is far from confirmed.

The rumored price? About $1 billion … roughly double Yammer’s valuation as of its last funding round in February.

If there is truth to this story, it could be viewed as an early exit for a company that is the “Facebook for businesses.” With over four million users in 200,000 companies worldwide, and a vision to be the place where work gets done, Yammer is a Facebook with a potentially more lucrative business model. But the “social inside” space is competitive, with Salesforce, Jive, and others poised to take their piece, and perhaps Yammer felt the need to take a certain exit now rather than face an uncertain future.

The acquisition fits for Microsoft: It sells to businesses, and its enterprise divisions have increasingly been pulling the revenue cart as Windows has been slowing. But the Redmond giant’s track record in large acquisitions has not been stellar. It’s hard to see enormous added value in Microsoft’s $6.3 billion for aQuantive, $1.5 billion for Navision, $500 million for Danger Mobile, and $1.2 billion for FAST search, not to mention the $8.5 billion investment in Skype about a year ago.

The question, as always, is what Microsoft would do with the new company and technology. If, like Skype, the relationship is arms-length, and Yammer continues to grow, this could be a positive for both companies.

On the other hand, if Microsoft attempts some massive integration with SharePoint, look out.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

Until now, Yammer customers used the product for internal communication, which was enforced by the fact that anyone in a Yammer network needed to have a company email address. But chief executive David Sacks said microblogging can be useful for working with partners, customers, and others, and also to create new kinds of networks. He painted a picture of how a series of connected Yammer Communities can start adding up to “the B2B social graph.”

The San Francisco startup has already recruited a number of launch partners, and they give us a sense of how companies could use Yammer Communities. Deloitte, for example, will use Communities to discuss projects with its consulting clients. Cleantech company Better Place will use the feature to coordinate with its manufacturing and vendor partners. And an unidentified media company has built a community for an advisory panel of 1,500 moms.

Sacks also gave reporters a quick tour of the product, during which he emphasized the separateness of each community. Not only is each community a separate stream of posts, but members even have different profiles for each one. Members can bring up a list of all their communities, which shows the number of unread messages in each network. That’s an important step in making social networking tools a valid replacement for email, Sacks said, because that makes it easier to keep up with all of your communication and not let messages slip through the cracks.

Yammer plans to launch the Communities feature on March 1, on its web, mobile, and desktop interfaces, and the feature will be included in Yammer’s standard pricing.

During the briefing, Sacks also shared that Yammer has 60,000 customers and made “seven figures” in revenue during its first year. Yammer has raised $15 million in funding.

Launched in September 2008, Yammer initially appeared to be just a simple Twitter clone that targeted businesses. The company has since gone on to implement many features that Twitter fans would surely appreciate, including a threaded discussion view, built-in file and photo attachments, and tags. Yammer says that over 60,000 organizations globally have adopted the service.

The site offers free and paid versions of their service — with the Yammer gold level at $5 per user, per month.

The service’s simplicity and trouble-free set up is likely appealing to businesses that can’t be bothered to manage another IT service, but it’s not the only enterprise-level micro-blogging solution. Organizations with the wherewithal to maintain their own solution have a slew of open source applications to choose from, including StatusNet, JaikuEngine, and TypePad Motion.

Emergence Capital Partners led the round, and general partner Jason Green also joined Yammer’s Board of Directors. Other investors include the Ron Conway-led SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, and Goldcrest Investments. The latter two also previously raised $5 million for Yammer.