Yammer Aims To Bring Microsharing Inside Corporate Firewalls

by editor on Feb.12, 2009, under TechCrunch

Later today at the LA Twiistup event, the makers of Twitter-for-business application Yammer will announce a new, hosted version of its software that will enable companies to install it inside their corporate firewall.

This was an inevitable move for the venture-backed startup to make if it wanted to expand its reach to larger companies who have security policies in place that would prevent users from communicating via the internet (something the normal SaaS version requires).

Customers will be able to switch back and forth from the SaaS version to the hosted one, since Yammer promises to transfer network information between both versions upon request. Pricing is $12 per seat per year, although the company says it will change its pricing according to the size and scope of its customers. The Yammer software can be installed on top of existing infrastructure and comes with a licensing agreement and support contract.

On a sidenote, Yammer has recently announced that it has open-sourced its iPhone application. The documentation can be found on GitHub.

Yammer was the overall winner of the TechCrunch50 conference and recently raised a $5 million round of funding. We’re quite happily using it internally here at TechCrunch, although it’s had its uptime problems before.

And if I can quickly slip in a feature request to the team: please add presence status updates for people in the network!

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