News

Yammer Chief Announces Departure from Microsoft

• By Gladys Rama
• July 24, 2014

David Sacks, co-founder and former CEO of Yammer, on Thursday announced that he is leaving Microsoft.

"Thank you to my current and former YamFamily for 6 great years and to Microsoft for the last two. I look forward to new adventures," Sacks wrote on Twitter.

In a statement to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, who was the first to report Sacks' exit, Microsoft said that it is folding Yammer into the engineering teams that oversee Office 365 and Outlook.

"As we've seen the Yammer experience extending throughout Office...it's now time to bring the Yammer organization together with our Outlook and Office 365 Shared teams as the next logical step in delivering an integrated set of social, collaboration, and communication experiences that enable companies to work like a network," Microsoft said in the statement given to Foley. "We thank David for his commitment to Yammer and Microsoft and wish him the best in his future endeavors."

Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012 in a deal worth $1.2 billion. Under the terms of the deal, Sacks became a Microsoft corporate vice president and Yammer became part of Microsoft's Office Division, led at the time by Kurt DelBene, who has since left Microsoft in the wake of last year's restructuring.

Since acquiring Yammer, Microsoft has taken significant steps to integrate the enterprise social networking company's technology into several of its products, including Office 365, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM Online. Though Yammer remained based in San Francisco after the acquisition, Microsoft last year created a "Yammer North" team to operate inside its Redmond, Wash. campus whose focus was on integrating the two companies' technologies.

Microsoft reported a 55 percent jump in Yammer subscriptions in the year after the acquisition, and a 200 percent increase in paid Yammer networks.

With Sacks' departure, Yammer is now under the purview of Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president for Office 365 engineering, Foley noted.