If you read the news, you know that the latest high-profile social media acquisition was just confirmed. Microsoft has agreed to acquire Yammer for 1.2 billion. Personally, I believe that Yammer’s amazing success can be mainly attributed to their wise decision to use Berkeley DB Java Edition as their backend data store. :-)

I’m only kidding, of course. However, as Ryan Kennedy points out in the video I recently blogged about, BDB JE did provide the right feature set that allowed them to reliably grow their business. Which in turn allowed them to focus on their core value add. As it turns out, their ‘add’ is quite valuable!

This actually makes sense to me, a lot more sense than certain other recent social acquisitions, and here’s why. Last year, IDC declared that we are entering a new computing era, the era of the “3^rd Platform.” In case you’re curious, the first 2 were terminal computing and client/server computing, IIRC. Anyway, this 3^rd one is more complicated. This year, IDC refined the concept further. It now involves 4 distinct buzzwords: cloud, social, mobile, and big data.

Yammer is a social media platform that runs in the cloud, designed to be used from mobile devices. Their approach, using Berkeley DB Java Edition with High Availability, qualifies as big data. This means that Yammer is sitting right smack in the center if IDC’s new computing era. Another way to put it is: the folks at Yammer were prescient enough to predict where things were headed, and get there first.

They chose Berkeley DB to handle their data. Maybe you should too!