Salesforce Exec Jumps, Lands at Social SaaS Provider Yammer

David Obrand, former VP of Vertical Sales and almost 10-year veteran at Salesforce.com, has landed at social networking provider Yammer as its new vice president of Global Sales. According to the press release, Obrand will oversee global sales and push for more adoption of Yammer. But what the release doesn’t say is that his new position at Yammer will put Obrand in direct competition with his former boss Marc Benioff at Salesforce.

Here’s why: By now, TalkinCloud readers no doubt know all about the Salesforce.com Social Enterprise strategy, of which Chatter, the Salesforce enterprise social network, is a cornerstone. And Yammer goes after those same customers, with a claimed user base of “80 percent of the Fortune 500” on its SaaS social platform. Intriguingly, Yammer already partners with NetSuite, itself a Salesforce competitor.

Obrand himself had this to say about his new job in a prepared statement:

Yammer is open to cloud ISVs thanks to its open APIs, but I’m waiting to hear back from the company’s representation about whether it has any kind of formal cloud integrator or service provider channel presence, and if so, whether Obrand will have any involvement.

In the meanwhile, I’m really interested at all of these cloud executives jumping ship from multimillion-dollar companies for smaller potatoes. Is that where the real cloud innovation is happening?