Yammer, Berkeley DB, and the 3rd Platform
- by Eric Jensen
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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 “3rd
Platform.” In case you’re curious, the first 2 were terminal computing and
client/server computing, IIRC. Anyway, this 3rd 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!
