Yammer announces acquisition of Scottish desktop application service oneDrum
Enterprise social network Yammer has announced the acquisition of Stirling based desktop application firm, oneDrum.
This is the first acquisition undertaken by Yammer, which will look to implement the service offer of oneDrum, which allows multi-author document creation and simultaneous editing.
“The deal will see Yammer able to change the way that we approach content so that now users will be able to synchronize content between their desktop and the Yammer groups seamlessly and co-create content in Microsoft documents. It will extend the power of what we can bring to customers so that they don’t just talk about work, but they can really create collateral and work the product socially and make it much more effective in the way that marketing teams and sales teams work with one another across regional offices or even within the same room.,” commented Georg Ell, general manager of Yammer EMEA.
Ell added that the service will begin to be made available to customers in the coming two months.
“It’s actually something that we will be able to extend over time and offer to our clients, and that’s a very powerful thing and the team at oneDrum build software in the same way that Yammer builds software, so there’s a great deal of cultural fit on the engineering side,” he added.
All nine engineers from oneDrum have joined and will work alongside the San Francisco engineering team, while oneDrum CEO Jasper Westaway will join the product team and lead integration, while CTO John Boyle will join Yammer’s engineering team.
“Employees spend a huge amount of time working with files, especially Microsoft Office documents,” said David Sacks, Yammer CEO. “Through oneDrum, Yammer will incorporate all of that content into the enterprise social graph, making it discoverable and collaborative in a way that has never been possible before.”
Westaway added; “Yammer was built to be social from the ground up, so it's natural for it to be the platform for maximizing content value. I’m proud that we’ll become part of the pioneer and leader in enterprise social networking to make our vision a reality.”
The deal has been handled by venture capital firm Amadeus Capital Partners, which has worked with oneDrum for the last two years, overseen by partner Alex Van Someren.