Aaron Levie, Box CEO: We Should Have Bought Yammer

It was clearly meant as a joke. Yammer is, according to many reports, just moments away from a big acquisition by Microsoft, so on stage at LeWeb in London today my colleague Mike Butcher asked Aaron Levie, the outspoken CEO of cloud storage player Box, if he had been interested in the enterprise social networking service. "Yeah, we should have bought Yammer, but they didn't come knocking." But like all good jokes, it's built on some kind of truth. Levie used the comment as a springboard to talk about the M&A potential for Box and the enterprise space in general, noting that deals like Vitrue and Taleo at Oracle, and Buddy Media at Salesforce, have contributed to around $10 billion in acquisitions in the enpterprise speace in the last few months. Box has made an acquisition in the past -- Increo Solutions, the document feedback and collaboration tool, back in 2009, but Levie says the bigger potential for Box is to ride the wave of fragmentation in the market (the very thing that is driving M&A) by becoming a platform for the rest to coexist peacefully together.

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