Microsoft buys LinkedIn for the data?

Microsoft buys LinkedIn for the data?

In an unusual move, Microsoft Microsoft Corporation 307,26 +2,43 +0,80% has announced that it will acquire LinkedIn. The deal announced yesterday (13 June 2016) for $26.2bn. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner posted the update to his employees following the announcement. Let's break down what we see.

LinkedIn has long been seen as a job and recruitment site, and I've used it as such myself. You can keep tabs on ex-colleagues for those future reunions, especially when they change email addresses as often as shirts. Industry and groups allow you to network with folks with similar interests. Recruitment agencies roam the site looking for connections to hover up networks and contacts, looking for the ideal candidate(s) to place.

LinkedIn is a social graph of who connects to who, and how or why. This is essential information for those who need to find and connect with decision makers. Indeed, this is the prime reason LinkedIn offers the Premium subscription, which removes restrictions about sending messages and visibility of people outside your network.

Now if you were a Salesforce Unfortunately, we could not get stock quote CRM this time. or CRM supplier, this data would be gold dust, so that you can help your customers grow from their base of current contacts in an organisation to expand that both within and to other organisations. Indeed, Salesforce did want to buy LinkedIn before Microsoft got there.  Microsoft also has a CRM platform, part of their Dynamics 365 suite.

Like LinkedIn, Dynamics is a -based platform. Microsoft can use its infrastructure to LinkedIn.  Data could be exchanged between them using API calls (and an appropriate subscription at a reasonable price plan. Data privacy is an issue here, so watch for changes in the terms and conditions that LinkedIn are likely to make after the deal finally closes.

With the announcement made, and the expectation is the deal will close at the end of the year. After that, let's see what happens. And to see if Microsoft starts restricting third-party access to LinkedIn via the APIs, or alter the price of access to them.

John Dixon

John Dixon is the Principal Consultant of thirteen-ten nanometre networks Ltd, based in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. He has a wide range of experience, (including, but not limited to) operating, designing and optimizing systems and networks for customers from global to domestic in scale. He has worked with many international brands to implement both data centres and wide-area networks across a range of industries. He is currently supporting a major SD-WAN vendor on the implementation of an environment supporting a major global fast-food chain.

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