Microsoft's planned acquisition of professional social media site hase been making the rounds and is no longer news, but their intentions for this acquisition of a site with maore than 400 million users, acess to data.
The purchase will gice Microsft access to professional job searches, organizations, training through Lynda.com amogst others. The two companies seem to make a perfect fit with job seekers getting acces to advanced professional tools and Office-users getting tailored help from professionals as stated my Microsoft CEO Satya Madella.
This acquisition is a logical reponse to competitiors such as salsforce.com and workday who have come to realise the inportance and rise to social network collaboration in modern connected enterprises.
But with this acquisition, questions arises such as: What information exactly is Microsoft interested in? How are they going to use the information froom the netwrking site? What are the inherent risks in integrating the information from the previously disparate entities?
The potential impact this acquisiton portends, as stated by Cybersecurity expert Dimitri Sirota, on data privacy is the fact Microsoft is buying the world's second largest personal database. He also says that for the acquisition to be a success, they have to show how they can enrich the software offerings from microsoft in such far flung ares such as CRM, communication, collaboration, productivity etc.
See: Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for a whopping $26.2 billion in big data push
The value of this purchase will be dervied from the usage of massive amounts of personal data, concerns will be raised as to how this how this this data usage is regulated to forestall a compromise of personal privacy. This is a major issue companies around big data must contend with.
Organisations stand a lot to gain from the tremendous marketing, sales and intelligence value that comes from aggregating as much custormer data as they can. This remains largely the motive behind MTN acquisition for Nigeria's last CDMA bastion Visafone in which the former stand more to gain from access to additional customer data than from the latter
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