Phones, Hockey, and Yammer

It’s funny how often I’ve been asked the last couple of weeks if I’m throwing out my Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone.

My answer?

NewsGator is alive and well, and moving faster than ever – since I suspect folks are actually wondering where Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer leaves us, our 4 million paid users, and our hundreds of tremendous Global 2000 customers and partners.

At a high level, having Microsoft increase the available enterprise social market – with a tool that’s been our primary lead-source recently – is good news for NewsGator.  As Steve Ballmer said yesterday, this acquisition is all about the freemium business model, which over time should mean a bigger on-ramp for more Microsoft customers sooner.  Yammer is positioned as another platform that Microsoft will ultimately make available for use by its ecosystem – along with SharePoint, Dynamics, Azure, Lync, Skype, and O365.  We always root for Microsoft to enhance its platforms so that we can provide even higher value-added social business applications for organizations around the world.  And to be clear, adding Yammer’s multi-tenant cloud microblogging service alongside services like Dynamics and Office 365 won’t replace SharePoint;  SharePoint will continue to be a primary collaboration platform for enterprises.  But we love having more ubiquitous Microsoft platforms in the world to build upon!

We’ve had great success bringing a full social business suite – secure, scalable, and globalized – to the Global 2000.  We believe we’re pretty incomparable at that.  Of course our success is measured by our fabulous clients, including some 4 million (and climbing) paid seats deployed across companies around the world like Barclays, eBay, General Mills, JP Morgan Chase, Kraft Foods, and Renault.  Our 70 partners around the world are an equally vital part of our ongoing success.

The Yammer news is an opportunity, though, for us to talk a bit more about the direction we’ve been heading for the past few months – and it’s worth talking about. 

Enterprise-scale social business demand is quickly moving from point features taken up virally, to social business applications tailored to specific workflows and industry verticals.  Those of you who connected with us during our global Get Social Tour over the last few weeks have heard me state that the social fabric will be ubiquitous, provided by the large enterprise software players.  SalesForce.com’s positioning of Chatter and VMWare’s move to make Socialcast free preceded Microsoft’s move to add an enterprise microblogging service to their quiver.  Just as tagging and blogging were old school in the 2010 product version time frame, microblogging was already table stakes before this latest move.  Every enterprise software offering has microblogging now.

We believe that the next step in enterprise social is making those omnipresent social capabilities much smarter and much more useful.  “Smarter” means (to mis-quote Clay Shirky) better filtering in lots of user-driven and auto-magic ways.  “More useful” means generating specific business utility from those generic capabilities.  Social learning in manufacturing industries is different from social media monitoring integrating marketing and sales;  microblogging is a piece of the fabric that can enhance both – when deployed in intelligent activity streams married appropriately to community-oriented workflows. 

As my British and Indian friends would say, we’re in the very early innings of the new world of work!

Today, NewsGator is unfashionably profitable while growing quickly, and we work extraordinarily closely with our customers and partners to release and deploy social business applications for the world’s largest organizations faster than anyone.

We’re closer than ever to Microsoft, and I personally appreciate how much they’ve gone out of their way the last couple of weeks to reaffirm their commitment to NewsGator and ensure we’re closely involved with figuring out the road ahead – both before and after this acquisition.  We’ll continue to leverage the ubiquitous platforms provided by the big enterprise guns, particularly Microsoft, while keeping pace with consumer-driven changes.

Hockey is big here in Denver.  And in the history of the game, Wayne Gretzky is known as The Great One. He acquired that moniker in no small part because he had a unique approach to the game: “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”  We’ll continue to lead the market to where the enterprise social puck is going next.

And, I love my Windows Phone, and I’m keeping it….until I have to buy a new one for Windows Phone 8!