Yammer acquires UK collaboration specialist OneDrum

Enterprise social network also looking to hire 40 software engineers in London

Enterprise social network provider Yammer has acquired UK-based collaboration tools developer OneDrum, which it says will enable it to differentiate itself more from its competitors.

Yammer's general manager of EMEA, George Ell, told Computing that his company was attracted to OneDrum because the two firms have similar cultures.

"One of the main reasons we went ahead with the acquisition was because it is similar to us in the way that its staff think, build code and the way its teams are organised," he said.

OneDrum was founded in 2008 and, according to its website, was created to "respond to the needs of modern information workers who need to be able to access and edit collaborative documents".

Ell said Yammer was particularly keen to acquire OneDrum's desktop synchronisation feature.

"If a user has files today in Yammer groups and they add the desktop sync capability, then that file structure will be replicated on the desktop, and it will sync automatically.

"What this means is that people can work on content offline using any application, and the user can just drag and drop those files into a folder structure in the way they always have, and they get synchronised," he said.

Ell said that other features include a "co-create" facility in which employees can work collaboratively inside a Word, PowerPoint or Excel file added to the Yammer desktop folder.

He said the OneDrum acquisition will allow Yammer to differentiate itself from many of its competitors.

"We're most often compared with Chatter, which does not offer anything like this. Although Jive has something similar on the content side, we think the acquisition will leapfrog us in front of them in terms of the fidelity; that is the experience between the desktop and the internet, in addition to the co-editing and co-authoring.

"Yammer is also compared to Newsgator but it has nothing like this. Although we integrate with SharePoint we are not dependent on it like Newsgator would be," he said.

Ell also confirmed the company will look to hire up to 40 software engineers for a new office to be based in London.

"We are opening a software engineering hub in Tech City and we've got a licence to hire up to 40 software engineers if we can find the right people," he said.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.