Later today at the LA Twiistup event, the makers of Twitter-for-business application Yammer will announce a new, hosted version of its software that will enable companies to install it inside their corporate firewall.
This was an inevitable move for the venture-backed startup to make if it wanted to expand its reach to larger companies who have security policies in place that would prevent users from communicating via the internet (something the normal SaaS version requires).
Customers will be able to switch back and forth from the SaaS version to the hosted one, since Yammer promises to transfer network information between both versions upon request. Pricing is $12 per seat per year, although the company says it will change its pricing according to the size and scope of its customers. The Yammer software can be installed on top of existing infrastructure and comes with a licensing agreement and support contract.
On a sidenote, Yammer has recently announced that it has open-sourced its iPhone application. The documentation can be found on GitHub.
Yammer was the overall winner of the TechCrunch50 conference and recently raised a $5 million round of funding. We’re quite happily using it internally here at TechCrunch, although it’s had its uptime problems before.
And if I can quickly slip in a feature request to the team: please add presence status updates for people in the network!
A good move to the right direction.
great move
100% only way for them to be successful with a gigantic competitor in their space. Very smart for lock-in.
This is what Twitter was planning on doing to make money. I bet there will be price war competition (way down from $12/seat).
Twitter does not have to complete with 10 users Yammer has.
We at Nansen use Yammer, I think its awesome! Just to bad you cant paste html. Would be nice to share youtube-videos.
Please mention competitors who are ALREADY doing this when you mention news like this. You guys are always making it sound as if Yammer is somehow doing something novel by going behind the firewall or releasing their iphone app as open source. There are competitors who have been doing this for much longer.
it is not true that large companies will only deploy software behind the firewall, it is not inevitable. Many of the world’s largest orgs are on Salesforce.com, RightNow, SAVO, etc in a SaaS environment.
In fact, this can be disastrous for Yammer if not managed well. It is very very difficult to maintain both hosted and installed software. For example, now the will have X versions of their software to support, not just the one that is hosted. Large orgs will not upgrade on Yammer’s schedule but their own. They will have lots of infrastructural environments to support, etc. Innovation can slow down b/c they will now need to handle backwards compatibility.
Of course it can be done, but it isn’t easy!
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Is TechCrunch doing to be doing a live stream from Twiistup 5?
Why not just use laconi.ca and host it yourself on a internal server. Its open source!
The same reason big companies pay lots of money to companies like Red Hat for Linux which is also open source. Support and value added features targeted at enterprises.
Intel has been piloting laconi.ca internally for about a month, and it’s been great. Almost completely switched over from yammer.
A note about that post: I commented that the laconi.ca codebase was not very modular or configurable. In the few weeks since then, the laconi.ca team has made some great progress, and I feel very good about the future of that platform.
Great move, I have been complaining about Yammer being online only and that my company blocks yammer.com. I am sure going to check it out when they have they have the download available.
Its true that I can use laconi.ca but its just that I don’t have the time for that. Even if its costs me couple of hundred dollars a year that’s far cheaper than the time I need spend in getting open source software up and running and maintain.
Yammer enterprise and Yammer iPhone app are probably a big blow for present.ly
This is a very smart move on yammer’s part, any really big enterprise will be wary of putting sensitive information on another companies server. I’ve already got an internal version of Laconi.ca running, but Yammer does have some nice features and is dedicated to enterprise microsharing, so worth looking at again.
Intridea’s Present.ly has been doing this for a long time. And many companies are currently using it.
Yammer’s ceo David Sachs said they’re adding direct messaging and multiple languages this quarter. And he claimed they got another $10M in funding, but it sounds like they have to split with their affiliate co. Geni.
Just today – just 10 minutes before this post – I have sent email to TechChrunch and mentioned about idea about netvorx. How we are planning to deploy netvorx etc. And then this post. Is that co-incident? Netvorx idea is same as this announcement. Lets see – depends when Yammer releases first in-house deployment version. If you releases soon then thats your idea
else …..
Actually I had sent email to techCrunch around 4.30 EST. And I have listed same idea on HackerNews http://news.yco.../item?id=451494
Well good luck Yammer. Well it is good that my brain working in same direction
Wow. $12/YEAR? You need a 100,000 users just to break a million in revenue.
While not a flawless proposition, I think it was necessary. They need to establish themselves “behind the lines”, literally. Corporations may be overly restrictive sometimes (OK, 99% of the tiem) but they have massive security budgets, email viruses, etc. to consider. Working directly with them will probably be very profitable in the long run. Good read on firewalls, other security issues, etc. here.
I have to wonder whether microblogging has any future in the business world. I’m sure there will be some good applications for it, but at a glance I see it as just a further step down the road of information overload now most readily experienced as e-mail bankruptcy. Most of us are involved with many simultaneous projects and hundreds of people. Weeding out the valuable blips in a steady sea of updates from so many people will be a job unto itself. I’d have to see how that influx could be controlled before I would buy into this model.
http://www.Broadcastr.net already does this.
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To respond to bitterbetterideaguy:
You’re right that Yammer doesn’t reduce email overload or info overload! Just blogged about this here: http://poprl.com/K1a
BUT it’s very valuable. Its value will be found in these areas instead: collaboration, breaking down silos, establishing interest groups, tapping into employee skills/expertise no matter where they live in the organization.
As for SECURITY/IN HOUSE:
We’re a software company and larger, especially listed companies we work with are all very concerned about privacy, information security, and information archiving and access. They have related auditor requirements which have to be met. Under 3000 seats seems to be generally happy with our hosted version, over 3000 and they have the will and resources to take it in house.
(Our company is also in internal comms technology – very different to Yammer tho, as we’re focused on transforming traditional push messaging into visual/multimedia messaging to increase employee response to critical, actionable info). http://www.cutt...munications.com
But I wonder how Legal or IT are going to STOP employees from signing up on Yammer and sharing company information between themselves. All they can do is sign up too, pay to monitor, and set up a code of conduct, I guess.
So I think they’ve got a very powerful business model, building take up from the ground up and really obliging companies to pay in order to monitor it. Are there any companies upset about this??
I also wonder if we’ll see Yammer replacing other social media software (like forums & Q&As). It’s so fluid and easy to create new tags/conversations/interest groups.