"(Out of the consumer space) you've seen the rise of social networks, which have been the most successful software of all time," Pisoni says. "Facebook is the most successful anything of all time, getting to a billion users in so few years. It's funny; compare that to social media initiatives in companies today. said that 70 percent of IT-dominated social initiatives fail. So you have this weird dichotomy where in the consumer world, the most popular tools are the social tools, but in the office, they're the most failed tools.

"Throughout the 2000s, you had consumer companies innovating like crazy while you had corporate companies locking down like crazy. Fast-forward to today and the gap--the gulf--between the (social) tools we have available at work and what we have available in our personal lives has become so great, and the access to tools has become so ubiquitous, that you've got this proliferation of 'lazy employees' who are just breaking the rules to try and make their jobs more powerful and efficient."

A BYOD Approach to Software

Yammer feels that letting employees choose which software is the best fit for their jobs is a continuance of the consumerization of IT and a "revolution in the enterprise today." Convincing employees and IT departments to join the "bring your own software" (BYOS) cause are two totally different beasts, however.

Many IT departments are just starting to warm up to the idea of letting employees bring iPhones to work, after all--wouldn't investing in social tools suggested by employees create whole new headaches and costs? That's where the freemium model used by Yammer and several other enterprise social network tools comes into play, Pisoni argues.