SAP teams with Yammer to make enterprise software social

This is absolutely a trend that will be repeated in months to come, if some of my interviews of just the past two weeks are any indication. Here’s the crux of what I’m talking about: SAP is the latest developer to layer “social” features into its enterprise resource planning software, through a relationship with Yammer.

Essentially, what the two companies have created is an extension that allows any updates to the SAP software to show up as an activity in the Yammer Ticker software.

To put things more simply, now anytime some on your team updates information within SAP, an alert notifying other team members about that update will be communicated via Yammer. The integration will work with SAP’s human resources, enterprise planning and customer relationship management (CRM) modules. If you click on one of these alerts, you’ll be pulled into the original record in the SAP software. Yammer and SAP offer the example of a salesperson being alerted if their customer’s transaction fails to complete properly.

Said Yammer CEO David Sacks:

“The integrations we announced today are a continuation of our strategy to be the social layer on top of all systems of record companies rely on, improving collaboration and decision-making around critical business activity. In particular, the Yammer SAP Connector increases the value of Yammer for many of our large enterprise customers who use SAP daily to manage business processes.”

The crux of the matter is that it is unreasonable for any upstart social business software to target really big companies unless they have a good way of helping to expose all the value content and information being created within legacy enterprise resource planning tools.

The integration between SAP and Yammer, which was developed by SAP business partner Freeborders, is supposed to be available by March 31.

Yammer also announced integrations with five other companies in mid-February. Those companies include:

• GageIn, a business content aggregator
• Kindling, a voting, comment and engagement platform
• Moreover Technologies, a media monitoring platform
• Planview, which specializes in portfolio management
• Sparqlight, a cloud workflow management platform

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