But when you’re a company with a lot of industrial-grade Internet infrastructure, including, say, a few of your own data centers, the rules can change a little bit, and you have the option of being a little more selective in determining how your data flows. And when you’re the Enterprise cloud and file-sharing and collaboration outfit Box, you turn that advantage into something your far-flung customers can take advantage of.

When file are big — and in business, they always are — and you need to share something, uploads can be a time-consuming pain in the neck. So Box today launched a network of what it calls Box Accelerators. A network of servers distributed around the world, they serve as outposts for Box’s primary data centers. Box customers around the world will be able to upload to these Accelerators, and thus speed things up, say CEO Aaron Levie. In some cases, Box is bringing to bear its relationship with Amazon Web Services, and that company’s global footprint.

“We’re making a big push on international expansion,” Levie told me in a conversation at Box’s Los Altos, Calif., headquarters last week. Over the summer, the company opened a new office in London, and announced plans to hire 100 people there, in order to double down on opportunities it sees in Europe.

Media companies, health-care companies, and companies and institutions engaged in scientific research often have to move large, cumbersome files around in order to make them available for collaboration with colleagues. The primary factor in slowing down that process is distance. For all the vaunted rhetoric of how the Internet makes the world a smaller place, when it comes to moving gigabytes or more at a time, the one thing standing in your way is the distance between you and the server you’re uploading to.

The network of Accelerators are intended to shorten that distance. Box customers will get a choice of servers closest to them, and those servers in turn will have an easier time of communicating with Box’s main servers at its network of data centers, including a newish-one in Las Vegas, and another two in California.

The service is going live in nine different regions around the world on every continent except Africa, and is available free of charge for existing Box customers. And while today the network is specified only for uploads, it will in time enhance the speed of downloads as well, Levie told me. And it will also be addressable by Box’s API, meaning that if you’re building an application that takes advantage of Box’s network, the accelerators will be available for use.

I took advantage of a few minutes with Levie to ask him about his reaction to last week’s disclosure by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he’s close to announcing a service called Chatterbox that will essentially compete with Box. Benioff will likely talk in detail about Chatterbox in his keynote address at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference on Wednesday. Expect collaboration and file-sharing to become part of Salesforce’s Chatter social platform soon.

Levie said he’s known about Salesforce’s intentions in this area for about four months to six months. “We’ve known about it, frankly they kind of have to do it,” he said. “If you think about Chatter, and Jive, Yammer, that kind of social world, it necessarily has to connect up to your content. And Salesforce is trying to carve out the space that Chatter can play in. It’s not enough to be a standalone social platform. Salesforce has basically realized that Chatter has to be able to solve more problems for the enterprise before they can have a serious conversation with a CIO.”

Content that companies share both internally and with partners, vendors, suppliers and customers has to be enhanced with social collaboration features. This is the very essence of companies like Jive and Yammer, and Salesforce’s product in this area known as Chatter. “Salesforce will take what it has as a social platform and add content to it,” Levie said. “What we’re doing is more like the inverse. We have a content platform, and we bring social aspects to it, where relevant. We work with all of the social platforms out there, and we’re going to be building more collaborative capabilities into Box.”

You might think this would be a tad awkward, given the fact that Salesforce is an investor in Box, and is even said to have offered to acquire Box last year, for north of $500 million.

Not at all, Levie says. “There are lots of precedents for companies being both investors, partners and competitors.” To me, it sounds like a diplomatic way of saying “game on.”

The idea is to let companies create their own environments where they share information internally and with partners and customers of their choosing. Exposing business processes to the kind of social flows that we’ve become accustomed to on Facebook and Twitter allows vendors and customers to participate in discussions more readily. As Salesforce puts it, this amounts to “breaking down the boundaries of the business.”

Most products that bring companies into the same place with the other entities they do business with are focused purely on the conversation, or on getting transactions done. Communities, Salesforce says, will let them do a lot more.

Deploy communities to support any business process — from franchises sharing best practices, to high-end retailers delivering custom shopping experiences, to universities looking to connect students with alumni.

If it sounds a lot like Chatter, it should, though that brand name appears almost nowhere in the announcement. It’s being run by Doug Bewsher, Salesforce’s SVP for Chatter. But the fact is that Chatter isn’t quite getting the traction that companies like Jive and Yammer are getting.

Salesforce’s news happened to drop on the same day as word of a major upgrade from Yammer, which is in the process of being absorbed into Microsoft. The software giant said in June that it would pay $1.26 billion for Yammer.

Among the new features is an in-box that gives the user a quick glance at new messages meant for their eyes, including mentions, group messages they’re included in and private messages. Another is a homepage view that, at a glance, gives you a look at what people in your company are buzzing about and what files are being actively shared.

There’s also a “presence” feature that indicates when someone is online at that moment, so you can start a conversation with them; you can easily add more users to the conversation as needed.

As you may remember, Yammer and Salesforce have a history of being rivals. Last year, Yammer launched a promotional campaign called “Friends with Benefits” that touted the fact that Yammer integrated data from Chatter, though they acted more like Frenemies.

If you invested some of your money in the series of big, splashy IPOs that Silicon Valley has largely funded and churned out over the last year, you might be a little irritated.

Even irked. Possibly quite out of sorts.

And you would have good reason if you looked at the performance of many of the freshmen companies that have come out since early last summer.

That’s because of all of them, only three — business network LinkedIn, enterprise software start-up Jive and the recently debuted travel site Kayak — are your friends, up 9.8 percent since its May 27, 2011, debut; 26 percent since a December 15, 2011, opening; and about six percent since an IPO last week, respectively. In addition, video services company Brightcove is up a small 2.7 percent since its February 21, 2012, IPO.

Not so much for the other four, which have been much rockier, in order of their public offerings: music streaming site Pandora, down 29.6 percent since its June 24, 2011, IPO; Groupon, down 72.3 percent since the daily deals site’s November 7, 2011, IPO; Zynga, down 46.6 percent since its December 19, 2011, IPO; and Facebook, down almost 23 percent since its May 18, 2012, IPO.

But the stock weakness — as social networking giant Facebook preps to release its first earnings report as a public company tomorrow, after Zynga’s disastrous Q2 results from its online gaming business earlier today — does not seem to have stopped the frothy valuations for private start-ups from being even more foamy.

Along with a $2.6 billion new mega venture fund from New Enterprise Associates, comes a Wall Street Journal report that online storage company Box is raising a new round at a $1.2 billion valuation and hopes to IPO at a $2 billion to $3 billion one next year; and online payments start-up Square is looking at a $3.25 billion-valued round, according to the New York Times, which is 13.5 times higher than just two years ago.

Caveat: While there have been some good returns to private investors in the M&A space of late, such as social enterprise network Yammer’s recent $1.2 billion sale to Microsoft, not everyone is going to get such deals.

And definitely not public investors for whom hope either springs eternal — or just springs a leak.

The new software takes advantage of touch interface capabilities available on tablet devices, but also runs as a service in the cloud. “Your modern office thinks cloud-first,” CEO Steve Ballmer said in remarks at an event in San Francisco, where he also made reference to recent Microsoft acquisitions including Skype, the video calling service, and Yammer, the social enterprise collaboration service it acquired for $1.2 billion last month.

Signaling the importance of tablets to the new release, Microsoft VP Kirk Koenigsbauer demonstrated the new service on a Samsung tablet running Windows 8.

One of the most eagerly anticipated features is SkyDrive, which stores active documents on Web servers so you can work on them interchangeably at home or the office. It’s also seen as a response to Google Apps, the Web-based office suite that Google has offered for a few years, and which is seen in some cases as a fair replacement for Office — and it’s often free. Koenigsbauer said that SkyDrive already has 60 million users.

Koenigsbauer also demonstrated that Skype has been integrated directly into Office. He initiated a Skype video call from within Outlook. The feature has been available for awhile using Microsoft’s Lync video conferencing service, but it’s the first time that Skype, which has a lot more users, has been seen integrated within Office.

He also showed off the capabilities of Microsoft’s latest acquisition, Perceptive Pixel. An 82-inch high-definition, touch-sensitive screen connected to a PC running Windows 8 made Koenigsbauer look a bit like a TV weatherman as he pulled up a screen showing the weather in San Francisco, but he switched quickly to a sports application. Then he started a video conference with five other people, as if they were participants in a meeting.

Several demos also included hand-written markups using a digital pen or stylus, taking advantage of a Microsoft feature called Ink. Office has supported various iterations of digital pens for more than a decade, but Ballmer said near the close of the event that “Ink is becoming a first-class citizen” of the Office environment. Ballmer also hinted at new features coming by way of the Yammer acquisition, saying the “potential for new directions is quite high.”

Rumored for awhile, word of the deal started to leak on Twitter and elsewhere about two weeks ago. Buzz picked up considerably around the same time that Yammer CEO David Sacks held a huge 40th birthday party at a rented mansion in Southern California.

Yammer will become part of the Microsoft Office Division, run by Kurt DelBene, though the Yammer team will continue to report to Sacks. The plan calls for Yammer to stick to its current track of developing its own service, while Microsoft pushes ahead to nudge further adoption alongside SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.

Initial speculation about the deal pushed shares of Jive, Yammer’s primary rival, up considerably. Following the standard “buy on the rumor, sell on the news” pattern, now that the rumor has become news, shareholders are bailing out and Jive shares are down about 5 percent to $19.45 as I write this.

Launched in 2008, Yammer has been the most promising of the social enterprise companies not named Jive. Last February, it raised a fifth round of funding — $85 million led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, at an implied valuation of about $1 billion $600 million.

Update: I’ve just heard from someone familiar with the February funding round that Yammer was valued at $600 million, or about half of today’s purchase price. No wonder Yammer’s employees were so giddy they couldn’t contain themselves at The Creamery.

Meritech Capital Partners, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group and Khosla Ventures also participated in that round. Prior investors include Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners; the angel investors are Bill Lee, Max Levchin and football great Ronnie Lott.

Coming as it did on the heels of Jive’s late 2011 IPO, conventional wisdom suggested that Yammer would follow and go for an IPO of its own.

But after that funding round, Yammer followed none of the usual steps associated with a pre-IPO company: While Sacks is a former PayPal executive, there was no effort at Yammer to recruit additional directors with public company experience.

The first few paragraphs of the official announcement are below. There was one acquisition — the British software firm OneDrum — but it was pretty small. There was no chatter about bankers or an S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Lacking all of that, it was pretty clear that a buyout was the more likely scenario.

Yammer can’t have ended up in better hands: A cash-rich owner with time on its hands. For all its vaunted popularity among large companies — you can’t have a conversation about it without running into its well-worn stat that it has five million users at 85 percent of the Fortune 500 — Yammer has a famously difficult time converting its free users to paid users. More often than not, a handful of employees will adopt it, with varying levels of success in integrating it into their workflow. Many just experiment with it and then never take to it.

Those who do like it usually find that the free version is sufficient. By Yammer’s own admission, its conversion rate is about 20 percent. That means that, of those five million users, a mere one million are paid users.

Jive, on the other hand, lets companies try its services out free for 30 days, then they have to start paying. While it doesn’t disclose the total number of individual users, it has 676 companies using its service and software, all of them paid.

Microsoft to Acquire Yammer
June 25, 2012
Microsoft extends cloud services with best-in-class enterprise social networking.

Here’s the official announcement:

REDMOND, Wash., and SAN FRANCISCO — June 25, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. and Yammer Inc. today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Yammer, a leading provider of enterprise social networks, for $1.2 billion in cash. Yammer will join the Microsoft Office Division, led by division President Kurt DelBene, and the team will continue to report to current CEO David Sacks.

“The acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft. “Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services.”

Launched in 2008, Yammer now has more than 5 million corporate users, including employees at 85 percent of the Fortune 500. The service allows employees to join a secure, private social network for free and then makes it easy for companies to convert a grassroots movement into companywide strategic initiative.

Yammer will continue to develop its standalone service and maintain its commitment to simplicity, innovation and cross-platform experiences. Moving forward, Microsoft plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.

“When we started Yammer four years ago, we set out to do something big,” Sacks said. “We had a vision for how social networking could change the way we work. Joining Microsoft will accelerate that vision and give us access to the technologies, expertise and resources we’ll need to scale and innovate.”

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.

Cue is an app that processes users’ emails, contacts and files. Then it presents a daily agenda, de-duplicates and updates contacts, and surfaces important details from things like flight confirmations and restaurant reservations.

Cue founders Daniel Gross and Robby Walker

(Update: The Cue iPhone app is now available. Cue is not available yet — it’s supposed to come out Thursday — but due to a snafu with a media embargo about the company’s relaunch, I’m posting about it now.)

As a larger topic, I’m really interested in intelligent personal assistants that could help bring context and efficacy to smartphones beyond what Apple’s Siri does today. Besides Cue, some other emerging projects in the space include Happiness Engines and Incredible Labs.

Cue is mostly a mobile app — at first only for iPhones — but it also has a Web interface. It will replace the former Greplin iPhone app, which was similar but more rudimentary.

On the occasion of the launch, Greplin, the company, is giving up its geeky name — “grep” is programming jargon for search — and will now call itself Cue.

The new name “literally means a hint as to what’s next,” as co-founder Robby Walker put it, which is exactly what Cue is trying to offer, by anticipating users’ needs and parsing through all their information to give them what’s helpful and timely.

One Cue feature that may grab people’s attention is a “Running late?” button at the bottom of every calendar item within the app. When the button is pressed, the app helps users automatically text whomever they’re meeting to send an alert. It also assists with things like canceling reservations and automatically pulling up maps to navigate the next location on the agenda.

Cue effectively stands in for a user’s calendar — so it works best for people who already use Google Calendar and perhaps also Facebook events and Basecamp deadlines, which Greplin supports and indexes. Cue sends push notifications about upcoming events, and then when users slide the notification to unlock the phone, they see an overview of where to go, who to call and other pertinent info.

Cue is the kind of app that probably eventually makes more sense at the level of a mobile operating system, where it can bring context and cooperation among all the redundant built-in apps like calendar, contacts and email. But the company doesn’t have those kinds of biz dev deals yet.

What Cue has spent its time on is building infrastructure to process this deluge of incoming personal data, as well as teaching itself to extract entities like receipts, confirmations and invitations and understand people in users’ networks by mapping and overlapping all their contacts and social media identities.

Like Greplin was, Cue at a basic level is free, but costs $5 per month or $50 per year for users who connect their accounts on professional-grade services like Yammer, Salesforce and Evernote.

Cue was co-founded by Walker and Daniel Gross, and was originally part of the Y Combinator program. It has raised $4.8 million from Sequoia Capital and angels including Bret Taylor (the soon-to-depart Facebook CTO and co-founder of FriendFeed), Paul Buchheit (now at Y Combinator, creator of Gmail and also co-founder of FriendFeed), Keith Rabois (of Slide and Square) and Geoff Ralston (former Yahoo exec and education investor).

That’s an old Wall Street saying that sums up with surprising accuracy the behavior of investors in the presence of uncertain rumors in the marketplace. The rumor in this case is the intention of the software giant Microsoft to acquire the enterprise social collaboration player Yammer for a price said to be in the neighborhood of $1 billion or slightly higher.

It is, as I argued in the wee hours of this morning, a plausible, if not a believable, rumor.

The spillover effect on rival Jive Software has been pronounced. Its shares rose today by $1.60, or more than 9 percent, to $18.33 a share, and has pushed its market valuation to north of $1.1 billion. Though even at that level, Jive is trading at a 35 percent discount to its 52-week high. It held its IPO late last year.

Naturally, there’s some hope among Jive shareholders that if Yammer ends up in the hands of Microsoft, someone else — perhaps Oracle or SAP — might step in and take out Jive at a healthy premium. Oracle has been making moves in the social space, buying Collective Intellect and Vitrue.

At least there’s some basis for the speculation. A deal for one company in a space often leads to a deal for another. We saw this pattern clearly late last year and early this year with a spate of deals for cloud-based HR software companies. The first to go was SuccessFactors last December, which SAP acquired for $3.4 billion. Next was Taleo, which Oracle scooped up for $1.9 billion in February. Meanwhile, Workday, the cloud-based HR play started by two former PeopleSoft execs, is on its way to a fall IPO. The fall of one domino leads to another.

No one authorized to speak for Yammer is talking about this. I will say that a lunch meeting I had scheduled on Tuesday in New York with Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni was suddenly canceled because of what I was told was a “personal emergency.” It could be coincidence, but then again it might not be.

Another bit of color I’ve heard — and again it may not mean anything — is that Yammer CEO David Sacks has invitations out for a big 40th-birthday bash in Southern California this weekend, at which rapper Snoop Dogg is expected to perform. Whether or not Sacks will be celebrating the sale of his company is still uncertain, but there’s a lot about the speculative story in Bloomberg — which cites two people familiar with the talks — that makes sense.

Outwardly, Yammer has looked to be the most promising of the social enterprise software players that are not named Jive. In February, it raised $85 million in a fifth round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, at an implied valuation of about $1 billion. Meritech Capital Partners, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group and Khosla Ventures also participated in that round. Prior investors include Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners, and the angel investors are Bill Lee, Max Levchin and the football great Ronnie Lott.

That round of funding came on the heels of the late-2011 IPO of rival Jive, whose market capitalization as of Wednesday’s close was $1.03 billion. Lots of people got rich in that offering, especially founders Bill Lynch and Matthew Tucker, and CEO Tony Zingale.

Jive had followed a fairly specific path to going public, which Yammer could have followed, but hasn’t. For example: Before raising a $30 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins in the summer of 2010, Jive had tapped Zingale, the veteran CEO of Mercury Interactive, who saw that company through its $4.5 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard.

Later, in early 2011, Jive added directors with public company experience to its board; then it set about making some important acquisitions, among them Proximal Labs, an “acqhire” deal; and then OfficSync, a deal that gave it crucial plug-in technology for Microsoft Office.

Yammer has done nothing like this, with one exception: Its April acquisition of the British start-up OneDrum looked an awful lot like Jive’s acquisition of OfficSync. Otherwise, there have been none of the classic pre-IPO signals from Yammer: No high-profile additions to the board, no more acquisitions, no chatter about bankers competing to lead it through the S1 filing and road-show process. When asked about his interest in doing an IPO, Sacks would, in conversations with me, tend to simply avoid the subject. A billion-dollar exit now would seem mighty attractive to Sacks and Yammer’s investors, rather than the uncertainty of an IPO in a shaky market, coupled with a head-to-head-to-head competitive slugfest with Jive and Salesforce.

Then there’s the simple matter of business challenges. Yammer is, by all accounts and its own publicly disclosed stats, having trouble converting its free users to paid status. It is quick to brag about its four million corporate users, but they’re fuzzy numbers. Many start using the service for free, experiment with it, but never turn out to be regular, daily users. Fewer still ever convert to paid status. Yammer has said in the past that its conversion rate is about 20 percent, which works out to about 800,000 paid seats. Getting companies to pony up has proven difficult. Jive doesn’t disclose the total number of seats, but it does disclose how many companies are customers: 676 as of March 31, all of them paying subscribers.

If Microsoft proves to be the buyer, then it would give the Windows and Office giant a key piece of technology to offer its enterprise customers. One big argument for the existence of the social enterprise software business is to attack Microsoft’s outdated collaboration software, SharePoint.

The players are many: Aside from Jive and Yammer, there’s Salesforce.com’s Chatter service, which tends to be strong in sales departments where the mainline CRM service is already in use. Other players include Socialcast, owned by VMware; Moxie Software and Atlassian’s HipChat are others.

Once Microsoft gets its hands on it, two things will be true: Yammer, which is generally seen as still being buggy and in need of a lot of smoothing out of its rougher edges, will need some serious investment. The problem is that, even at a $1 billion valuation, Yammer is small enough that it will disappear inside Microsoft.

The other is that the freemium business model will have to go away. With the possible exception of Skype, it’s just not in Microsoft’s DNA to offer an enterprise product for free and leave it to the users to upgrade to the paid version when it suits them. When the rubber meets the road, many customers may dump Yammer in favor of something else. Those who are serious and willing to pay will consider Jive, which would probably capitalize on the opportunity by offering special deals to customers who switch. Those who demand free will switch to something they can still get for free.

We’ll see if this deal materializes. Bloomberg said a deal could be announced as early as today.

The Crocodoc founding team breaks for a glamour shot.

Document viewing in HTML5 might not sound like a big deal, but being able to search and highlight and copy text can be pretty clutch.

What Crocodoc doesn’t do is allow users to edit documents — something co-founder Ryan Damico called “the holy grail.” ’Cause if there’s one thing we cloud-lovers hate, it’s firing up desktop software to mess with a file.

One other Web service that does good HTML5 doc conversion is Scribd, but Crocodoc improves on Scribd’s basic hosting by offering its enterprise customers hooks to integrate documents within their own products. Crocodoc is also quite speedy, with an average PDF-to-HTML time of three seconds, according to Damico.

Here’s a comparison Damico sent me that nicely demonstrates what Crocodoc can do:

• Sample document in Dropbox using Crocodoc
• The same document in Google’s viewer
• The original PDF

Damico said each of Crocodoc’s customers are paying “pennies per document, with discounts.” So far, the customers are all swallowing the cost and providing document viewing as a free addition to their existing products.

Crocodoc has a small team of four founders, who have worked together on similar tools for the past seven years, since meeting at MIT. They’ve tried a whole bunch of different businesses for their technology — first a Web-clipping tool similar to Evernote (that was called WebNotes, and is still running “on autopilot”); then a consumer product for marking up documents (that will continue to exist as Crocodoc Personal); and now, an enterprise product. After raising $1 million in funding, the company is now profitable, Damico said.

One of the things the company signaled it was going to do with that money was make acquisitions. Today it announced its first: OneDrum, a British start-up that specializes in making Microsoft Office a lot more collaborative.

Financial terms aren’t being disclosed, and OneDrum is a pretty early-stage company with 10 employees and combined $2 million in capital raised, mainly from angels and Amadeus Capital Partners, a British VC firm. But, the deal is invariably going to be compared to a similar one announced last year by Yammer rival Jive for OfficSync.

I talked to Yammer CEO David Sacks about the deal earlier today and I asked him about the comparison. He said that one thing OneDrum does that OfficSync does not is a level of desktop synchronization that’s comparable in some ways with what you find with something like DropBox. And, it does so without the need for a plugin that might, he argues, mess up how Office runs and which can be difficult to deploy across an enterprise.

Basically, Yammer customers will be able to share and see the contents of the folders they share with other people via Yammer. Also, people can collaborate on Office documents live. Changes are tracked within the Yammer news feed and revisions are stored. Once you drag a document into your Yammer folders, the contents are instantly text searchable from within Yammer.

What OneDrum lacked, Sacks told me, was “a good front end to express the OneDrum technology,” which Yammer will readily provide.

Today, Atlassian will announce that it has acquired HipChat, a maker of a specialized private instant messaging and chat platform aimed at companies. Financial terms are not being disclosed. But it’s pretty apparent the two were made for each other. HipChat has some 1,200 customers, including Groupon, HubSpot and Wired. The plan is pretty simple: Atlassian will incorporate HipChat into its own software. There’s probably a good bit of overlap between them.

HipChat’s three founders — Pete Curley, Garret Heaton and Chris Rivers — are all joining Atlassian. Their history, as described on their Web site, is pretty basic: “We created HipCal. Plaxo liked it so we went to work for them. We created Plaxo Pulse. Comcast liked it, so we went to work for them. HipChat is our current baby.” Now add: “Atlassian liked it, so we went to work for them.”

I talked briefly with Atlassian president Jay Simon yesterday. “None of our tools has a real-time component,” he told me. “They’re all asynchronous. HipChat is going to give us that.”

People often flock to the basic tools, like AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, when they need something instant. HipChat does the instant messaging part, but it also has features like chat rooms that remain persistent, which means they don’t blink out of existence when people using them leave. Files can be shared easily, and APIs from other platforms are supported. It’s also secure.

Consider Atlassian a variant on the social enterprise and collaboration trend that’s been rocking the enterprise in recent years, with the appearance of companies like Jive Software, Yammer, Saleforce.com’s Chatter and VMWare’s Socialcast, to name a few. Atlassian’s tools (its main one is called Jira) allow teams of software developers to work together, keep track of what each member of a team is doing, squash bugs and do whatever else it is they need to do. And among its 20,000-odd customers are the kind of companies you’d want to be doing business with: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Adobe, LinkedIn and Cisco Systems. Pay attention now, because someone is going to buy this company.

Published reports on Pando Daily had previously suggested that the company was close to landing a round in the $50 million neighborhood, with the implied valuation between $500 million and $1 billion, a range so large you could drive a tank through it. Yammer won’t say one way or another, but it’s pretty safe to say the higher number is the more accurate one.

Prior investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners are all participating again, as are angel investors Bill Lee, Max Levchin and football great Ronnie Lott.

Clearly, the intent here is to raise Yammer’s visibility game a bit, in the face of more visible players in the social enterprise software space — like Jive, which IPO’d late last year, and Chatter, which Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff can’t seem to stop telling people will save the world. Social enterprise software is becoming an increasingly popular and thus competitive business. Jive’s IPO gives it some visibility that doesn’t hurt when it goes to win business from new customers. Chatter tends to be less of a rival, though its strength is in places where Salesforce.com is already well-entrenched, which is the sales department.

One thing that’s going to happen is that Yammer will kick off a large advertising campaign, using print and online ads that aim to tell the world about how enterprise social networks are making companies more efficient in their collaboration.

The other thing is that the drumbeat about a Yammer IPO will start to get louder as the year goes on, though if you ask CEO David Sacks about it, as I have on more than a few occasions, he says very little, and you might be tempted to consider this massive round a case of Jive envy.

Lots of people got very rich on that IPO, and there’s absolutely no reason the same thing couldn’t happen with Yammer: Having launched some years back as a “Twitter for business,” it has evolved into more of a Facebook-like service for getting things done across a company.

Yammer has more than four million corporate users, including employees at more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500. Most of those are simply people inside a company, who signed up for Yammer and may or may not be using it on regular basis. The company has said in the past that it has a 20 percent conversion rate, which works out to about 800,000 paid seats. Part of the advertising campaign may involve trying to kick the conversion rate up a few notches.

Also? Yammer signaled in its press release that it plans on making some strategic acquisitions. This could go two ways. First, Yammer could try and roll up some smaller, lesser-known players in the business and take their customers. Or it could be eyeing some interesting “acqhire” cases, where there are some smart people running early-stage companies that could add some capabilities to Yammer’s. We saw Jive do precisely this, when it acquired OffiSync in May.

The funding comes less than a week after Yammer said it had integrated SAP into its activity streams, making it the first among the social enterprise companies to do so. Sacks has described Yammer as something of a “Switzerland of collaboration,” and has added the ability of something like 15 different enterprise software applications to talk to Yammer, some of them more important than others. That may be so, but given how hot the social enterprise business is getting by the day, it’s starting to look a lot more like the hypercompetitive Coke and Pepsi.

The move is the latest by Yammer to integrate with other third-party software. Last year, Yammer raised eyebrows a bit by integrating Salesforce.com’s competing Chatter social enterprise service into its own software. Later, it integrated Box.net and a batch of other services, like Microsoft SharePoint and NetSuite.

Yammer didn’t work directly with SAP on the integration but instead turned to an SAP developer called Freeborders to build a plugin that companies using SAP can install into Yammer. They call it the Yammer SAP Connector.

SAP’s main business is around Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP software, which companies use to plan and operate their business. In SAP’s case, ERP is run as old-school, on-premise software rather than in the cloud as a software-as-service approach. SAP rival NetSuite sells its ERP software in the cloud.

The big deal about social enterprise software — which includes not only Yammer, but the recently IPOed Jive Software, Salesforce’s Chatter, and VMware’s Socialcast — is that collaboration across a department, a division, an entire company, or between a company and outside partners can be as easy as the social experience on Facebook or Twitter. It’s a big craze in enterprise software circles right now, spurred in part by overflowing and inefficient email in-boxes, and the Facebook generation entering the workforce.

I talked with Yammer CEO David Sacks about this yesterday, and he told me that one important aspect of the plugin is that it adds a “follow” button to SAP. So, if you’re an SAP user inside a particular company, you can follow a piece of data or a project or an event in SAP as readily as making a friend in Facebook.

The Connector plugin sends events from SAP to the Yammer ticker, which looks suspiciously like a Facebook activity stream. If something important to you happens in SAP, you’ll see it in Yammer first, and a link will take you directly to the SAP record.

SAP isn’t the only product being integrated into Yammer today. Yammer added five others: GageIn, a business content aggregation platform; Kindling, which bills itself as an ideation company; Moreover Technologies, a media monitoring concern; Planview, a portfolio management product; and SparqLight, which is used to manage workflow in the cloud.

By my count, that makes 15 different services that work with Yammer. The next logical one, on my scorecard, is Oracle. I asked Sacks about that. “It’s definitely on the road map,” he said. Yammer’s strategy is essentially to be a “social Switzerland” that works with all the important business software, whether it runs in the cloud or on-premise. “We’re not going to be beholden to any one technology,” Sacks told me. “We want to be the social layer that lays on top of all the important enterprise applications.”

Whatever Yammer is doing, it appears to be working. It finished 2011 with more than four million end users at 200,000 companies, and late last year it lured a key senior executive away from Salesforce. It is also said to be close to landing a $50 million investment, at an implied valuation variously reported to be between $500 million and $1 billion.

Sacks had nothing to say on the subject of raising money. Last year, Yammer raised $17 million from Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital Partnership; in 2010, it raised two rounds, a $25 million Series C led by US Venture Partners, and a $10 million B round led by Emergence Capital. But something tells me this is going to be a big year for Yammer.

Last month, the company estimated it will sell 11.7 million shares in a price range of $8 to $10. Lead underwriters on the deal are Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs with Citigroup, UBS, BMO Capital Markets and Wells Fargo also participating. At $10 a share, Jive would be valued at $573 million.

The company’s executives have been on a road show in recent weeks. You can see CEO Tony Zingale give a 32-minute talk complete with slides on the company on the Web site Retail Roadshow.

The IPO will mark a nice exit for venture capital investors Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins who have backed Jive to the tune of $57 million in three rounds, the largest of which came in August of 2010.

The deal also takes place against the backdrop of a sudden surge in interest in enterprise software companies, particularly those that run in the cloud. SAP snapped up the cloud-based HR software player SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion earlier this month, while in October Oracle acquired RightNow for $1.4 billion.

Along with Taleo, Jive will quickly become part of the conversation concerning cloud-based acquisition targets.

While initially Jive’s software was delivered as an on-premise, behind-the-firewall product, it has in recent months been boosting its cloud-based business. In its original S1 filing, it said that as of the six months ended in June, it derived 59 percent of its sales from cloud-based software.

Sources tell me that Yammer will officially announce on Monday that Samantha Loveland (pictured), VP for customer success at Salesforce.com, has joined Yammer as vice president for worldwide customer engagement.

Loveland — who, according to her LinkedIn profile, goes by “Sam” — will report to David Obrand, another Salesforce alum who was hired by Yammer in October as vice president for global sales. Her job will be to run the team that consults with customers after a sale to make sure they get what they need out of the product.

Yammer is certainly on the move. It’s going to finish the year with a combined four million end users at 100,000 companies, and in September it closed a $17 million round of funding led by the Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya. Prior investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and US Venture Partners also participated, bringing the total capital raised to $57 million in four rounds.

Yammer is also something of a rival to Salesforce.com, and has been playing that fact up recently, gently jabbing at Salesforce as a “friend with benefits.” It also took advantage of Salesforce’s publicly available API to integrate Salesforce.com’s Chatter within its Yammer. It is fair to say that these companies have something of a history.

Anyhow, Loveland’s first day on the job at Yammer will be Monday.

Basically, the argument goes like this: Since the protestors in Egypt organized and collaborated via Facebook and Twitter against a government that didn’t understand the tools, companies that don’t embrace social enterprise and collaboration tools like Chatter will wind up like Mubarak — overthrown, or rather defeated by their competitors.

Yes it’s a stretch, but you certainly can’t fault Benioff on the passion and enthusiasm of his delivery. And since it’s a Salesforce.com event — Cloudforce New York — there’s no one to yank him off the stage.

There will also be news. Benioff will talk about a new mission for Radian6, the social media monitoring outfit that Salesforce acquired in March for $326 million. Expect to hear him talk about the “social marketing cloud” quite a bit.

What does that mean? Radian6 will be getting some new features around engaging and messaging sales leads and contacts on Facebook and Twitter and Web forums, and so on. It will have some powerful tools for filtering all the junk that people post and look for places where people are expressing clear sentiment or intent to buy, asking for guidance, or maybe looking for a deal.

In an example Salesforce showed me in a demo yesterday, if someone is looking for an online stock broker and asks their Twitter friends for a recommendation or about a specific broker they’re thinking of, that company’s social media team will see the message, classify it as a sales lead, and can reach out with special offers. The same thing goes for customer service messages. When someone is unhappy about something — say, their cable service — those posts can be automatically assigned to the right person for a follow-up, a special offer, or whatever the case may be.

People so often turn to Twitter and Facebook to give feedback or to express outrage about products these days, and companies are still figuring out how to respond and work with those platforms. It’s all about protecting brands.

Benioff’s talk takes place against the backdrop of a lot of uncertainty around Salesforce’s share price, valuation and growth prospects. Salesforce stock has been slapped around a bit following an earnings report that analysts didn’t exactly love, yet you can’t deny its revenue growth rates are impressive: Salesforce is on its way to being a $3 billion company next year.

The problem with Salesforce is how the market should calibrate its valuation. The shares have traded as high as $160 and as low as $109 this year, and closed yesterday at $110.58. Premarket sentiment this morning shows Salesforce stock headed up about 3 percent as of 8:08 am ET. Some people — namely hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson — have argued that Salesforce is fairly valued at about 75 percent lower than where it’s trading now. Expect Benioff’s comments today to give the shares a lift. But given how volatile the shares have been, don’t expect it to last.