Web3Skills

The folks over at Yammer have come up with a brilliant way to bring a collaboration web app into the corporation, and at the same time, make some money from it.

Yammer is essentially Twitter for business – with some pretty nifty features.  To sign up for the service you need to provide a corporate email address.  Then, you get your co-workers, staff and maybe your boss to sign up – all free at this point.  What happens next is the local IT department jumps in and figures out it wants a piece of the action (you know – control, control, control).  The “corporation” then “claims the network“.  That means they get administrator privileges – manage content and members, set the password policy, restrict access to the company’s network, use a corporate logo – for just $1 per user per month.

I could easily see this as a stealthy SaaS model that will become very popular:  1. Get the corporate users on board; 2. Give IT the control when realize they can’t do anything to stop it; 3. Make money.

Absolutely brilliant!