Starting today you can now embed Yammer into other applications thanks to one of a the new plugins under the new Yammer Connect umbrella. In addition to Yammer Embed, the company is announcing Login Button, a tool that will allow other applications to accept Yammer credentials for authentication, much like Facebook Connect.

This brings the company into further competition with VMware, which earlier this year announced a single sign-on service called Horizon App Manager. Vmware also acquired Socialcast, a direct competitor to Yammer, this year. Socialcast already includes a mechanism for embedding its stream into other applications.

It’s been a busy week for Yammer, which also announced a connector for Salesforce.com that enables users to stream activities from the CRM system into Yammer – a direct challenge to Salesforce.com’s own social networking tool Chatter.

Yammer co-founder and CTO Adam Pisoni Yammer has been increasingly focusing its focus on integrations. He says the ability to embed Yammer into other applications has been one of the most popular feature requests from both customers and potential customers.

“In the consumer space, social wasn’t just a destination,” Pisoni said. Instead, tools like Facebook Connect brought social into many applications. Enterprise customers want the same sort of experience, he says. Most have huge investments in existing applications but want to bring social features into them.

The company has offered a Web Part for SharePoint, which allows SharePoint users to embed Yammer within SharePoint, since last summer. Pisoni says this has been tremendously successful for Yammer.

The Yammer Embed plugin uses a simple JavaScript embed to bring Yammer into other applications. The new JavaScript API coupled with the existing Yammer API will allow customers to customize integrations.

The Yammer Login Button is an intriguing addition as well. Yammer already integrates with Active Directory, meaning this could serve as an integration point between multiple hosted applications.

Managing identity across multiple cloud applications is becoming a major priority. Enterprises consist of many individuals. Non-employees, such as customers, partners, consultants and contractors are increasingly being called on to use enterprise applications. Professionals – ranging from freelancers to employees at small professional services firms to executives at large corporations – now work with applications hosted organizations, and managing an identity across organizations could become a big business. Several companies are interested in owning the cloud professional identity space, including VMware and LinkedIn. Yammer is throwing its hat into this ring as well.

Services Angle

These moves shore up Yammer’s enterprise appeal in advance of Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event and VMware’s VMworld event, both next week. VMware cited Socialcast’s existing enterprise traction as a major reason for the acquisition Brian Byun, VP of VMware’s Cloud Applications business unit, told me in May. Socialcast’s customers include GM and Philips. Chatter has also seen strong traction with existing Salesforce.com customers. For example, Dell has rolled out Chatter enterprise-wide.

Last year Yammer reported triple digit growth, but didn’t disclose particulars, making it hard to gauge its traction. It’s attracted some big name customers. For example, Capgemini has over 25,000 users in its Yammer network and Nationwide has approximately 15,000 users. Pisoni says the company actually has more traction with large enterprises, where the communications problems Yammer is trying to solve are more accute, than in the SMB space.

This seems like good traction, but up to now other companies such as Socialcast and Qontext have lead in the integration space. These new features make Yammer a more serious contender than ever before.