Yammer bangs the hammer for enterprise social networking

Enterprise social network Yammer arrived in the UK this week, and even London mayor Boris Johnson welcomed the news.

The start-up took its position in the heart of east London's growing 'Tech City', and announced plans to double its presence in the area by the end of the year.

Gartner's latest figures show that revenues for enterprise social networking products are expected to rise 16 per cent by the end of this year to $769m.

Many of the biggest IT companies have set high hopes on the growth of the technology, and are buying into the market or have developed their own in-house offering. These include IBM with Lotus Connections, SAP with Streamwork, Cisco with Guard, Novell with Vibe, and VMWare's recent purchase of SocialCast.

There are also independent enterprise social networking players, like Jive Software, Social Text and the UK's Huddle.

Yammer's vice president of customer engagement, Dee Anna McPherson, said in an interview with V3 that her organisation's product will outpace its rivals. She gave an interesting insight into the ways enterprises use the social application, as well as how the firm's product roadmap will develop.

Yammer now has some form of presence in 80 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies, according to its own figures, and 40 per cent of its customers are from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

McPherson explained that one of the ways Yammer plans to increase its market share is by continuing to partner with business software firms. The company signed a deal with NetSuite in May, and has just announced integration with Microsoft SharePoint.

One of Yammer's strengths over many of its larger competitors is that it has a neutral offering, according to McPherson.

"Lots of enterprise software vendors will create social applications, but they will be in silos to other software. The unique thing about Yammer is it operates as a neutral layer," she said.