Yammer Partnership with Kanjoya Signals the Beginnings of the Quantified Enterprise™

Yammer, the Enterprise Social Network providers recently acquired by Microsoft has recently announced that they are partnering with Kanjoya, a vendor specializing in sentiment analysis primarily for marketing and sales support. The partnership will bring that sentiment analysis from the public facing social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to the text data generated by everyday interaction on the internal social networks that Yammer provides. With this information, Yammer will provide dashboards, metrics, and actionable insight to help judge employee's emotions - which can in turn be used to help boost employee retention, aid project managers, and establish metrics of team or company morale.

We see this as a primary step in building what Saugatuck has identified as the future intersection of BI and Analytics, the Quantified Enterprise™. From 1098SSR:

The Quantified Enterprise is an emergent scenario where the data and value generated by the use of Collaborative, Mobile, Social and all other forms of business IT enable a “BI feedback loop,” wherein measurement of the use, effects and benefits of IT and business software can be combined, analyzed, and delivered to optimize business decision making in close to real time. In the Quantified Enterprise, disparate software, data sources, and analytics engines combine in a Hybrid Cloud environment where integration software continuously translates both structured and unstructured data from different sources into one or more Big Data repositories, which then are mined, queried, and shared by all business units.

Yammer's move to bring outside analytics into their platform indicates that their own strategy as part of Microsoft is compatible with the above model - rather than focus on the development of tools internally, they work through integrations to bring in additional functionality on their already capable ecosystem. This focus is consistent with the view we have developed that strong ecosystems and integrations will become the primary differentiator for Enterprise Social Networks. This strategic partnership is a push in the right direction for Yammer, and we expect that there will be more analytics-focused integrations inbound and outbound in their pipeline. The market for ESN software is still relatively new, and as customers come to understand the potential value of measurement the vendors will evolve rapidly to deliver advanced capabilities to attract potential clients interested in the value add that sentiment, clickstream, and social graph analysis can deliver within the firewall.

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Alex Bakker

Alex Bakker is a Senior Research Analyst for Saugatuck Technology. He is currently the lead analyst around Social Business, Enterprise Social Networking, and Collaboration software, which he has been covering for two years, since joining Saugatuck in 2010. Alex also specializes in preparing and analyzing the data from Saugatuck's surveys and uses his model building experience to develop forward-looking market analyses.

Prior to Saugatuck, Alex worked as an IT consultant where he provided server maintenance and IT continuity support to businesses. Alex has been working in, or covering IT for five years.

Alex is a Whitman College alumnus, where he earned a Bachelor's Degree in Economics.

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