VMware has acquired Socialcast, a provider of enterprise communications solutions which emphasize social collaboration. The acquisition follows a number of other recent acquisitions which VMware is using to further develop its end-user computing model of providing secure access to applications from any location or device while embracing new collaboration and communications technology, VMware said.
San Francisco-based Socialcast develops real-time enterprise collaboration platforms. The company's software can be delivered as a hosted service, a private cloud implementation, or via an on-premise solution. Socialcast's customers can deploy the software to create a social layer across business systems and employee communication channels to help facilitate information-sharing, knowledge transfer across geography, employee engagement, and task management, VMware said.
VMware's cloud computing platform was designed as a way to allow multiple cloud vendors and their partners to build applications for customers on a common platform, and so the acquisition of Socialcast could compete with partners developing similar applications.
Socialcast becomes another piece in VMware's end-user computing portfolio, which includes VMware View desktop virtualization, ThinApp, SlideRocket, and Zimbra. End-user computing is a big part of VMware's push into cloud computing, an opportunity which the company tells partners is many times larger than the one around virtualization. They include the ability to integrate social capabilities across multiple applications instead of being embedded in a single application; the ability for users with multiple types of client devices, operating systems, platforms, and even clouds to securely collaborate; the ability to deploy on-premise or off-premise as a SaaS offering or as a VMware virtual appliance; and the ability for enterprises to build their own collaboration applications.
