VMware acquires social collaboration specialist Socialcast

VMware has announced the acquisition of Socialcast, a provider of social collaboration solutions for the enterprise.

The deal marks VMware's third acquisition in the collaborative tools market in the past 18 months: it acquired SlideRocket earlier this year and Zimbra in January 2010. 

Socialcast's software is designed to bring collaborative business tools such as Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint together onto the same platform to make business information easier to mine.

"The post-PC era will be defined by a way of working that is increasingly social, real-time and collaborative," said Brian Byun, vice president and general manager, cloud applications, VMware.

"For enterprise collaboration to improve business outcomes it can't just be a feature in a single application.

"Organisations need a new social collaboration fabric that pulls information from applications people already work with," he added.

"Socialcast integrates real-time activity streams from collaborative tools such as SharePoint with enterprise systems. This is the new way to work."

Socialcast allows people, information and enterprise applications to interact within collaborative communities, and the solution can be delivered as a hosted service, private cloud implementation, or via an on-premise solution.

Customers of Socialcast include Avaya, Nokia and Philips Electronics.