VMware Buys Another Slice of the Cloud With SlideRocket

In a surprise move, virtualization and cloud base specialist VMware has purchased online presentations tool SlideRocket. VMware purchased electronic mail collaboration suite Zimbra earlier this year and this latest acquisition indicates VMware is staking a lay claim in the productivity cloud mart.

At pose there's a complex Chess game winning place when it comes to cloud computing. More or less companies, like Google with its Docs suite, have dived straight in. However, Google has the money to evolve products–Docs started slay as an online analog of Microsoft Office, for representative, before it became clear-cut that quislingism would define the product.

New companies know the dapple is important but aren't so brave. Huge rewards are out there but it makes Thomas More sense to follow in the footsteps of others rather than be a pioneer. Thence, big fishes gobble awake smaller fishes, with the Bob Hope that it will one day do sense.

In light of this, VMware's strategy is a unyielding to figure knocked out.

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SlideRocket reinvents PowerPoint for the cloud, oblation the ability to link up-in to Web resources to slides, and offer interaction with users. It too features powerful analytics tools that fire help organizations evaluate the performance of their presentations.

If a company like Google had purchased SlideRocket, we could expect its functionality to be co-ordinated into existing products. Yet, VMware is barely present in the in the flesh productiveness market, away a handful of desktop virtualization tools. It's an organization meshed towards enterprise base and services. Non only does it lack standardised products but I'm not sure it has the kind of sales and marketing positioning to do much with SlideRocket either.

However, we might be witnessing the birth of a strategy. VMware's sooner acquisition, Zimbra, reinvents groupware for the cloud. SlideRocket reinvents PowerPoint for the cloud. I wouldn't be at all surprised if VMware is sniffing around start-ups that are doing similar reinvention tricks with word processing, spreadsheets, and other traditional productiveness apps–beat the cloud, naturally.

Zimbra and SlideRocket aren't simply cloud analogs of desktop applications. They couldn't live if they weren't cloud applications. So, Brian Byun, VP and general manager at VMware agrees, locution "SlideRocket's cloud-based architecture, innovative designing, and strong integration with other cloud applications and services possess transformed a decades-old business enterprise productivity package and redefined the way we consume and communicate information."

Put differently, VMware is wise enough to avoid departure head-to-head with Microsoft Office. Instead, they seem to be intelligently seeking products in order to produce a similar just different mix, and one that was born in the sully.

However, VMware of necessity to invalidate acquisition malaise kicking in, wherein companies acquire past organizations but do very little with them, reselling them a few years later or quietly killing them.

If nothing else, in the cloudy incoming, few individuals or organizations are exit to enjoy subscribing to many different services. Consolidation will have to happen, and the winners volition be companies that pass a impregnable, integrated product at a fortunate price guide and behind a single login.

Has VMware the resources to do this? If information technology does, it could allow a unique perspective on defile productivity that wrong-foots both Microsoft and Google. But there's clearly a lot of work yet to be through with.

With the purchase of SlideRocket, VMware has become a to the full-fledged player in the software program-as-a-overhaul (SaaS) marketplace and it'll represent very interesting to see what happens close.