Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Is VMware building an Office365 competitor?

Sure seems like it. VMware recently announced the acquisition of SlideRocket. SlideRocket has developed a SaaS application for building, delivering, and sharing presentations online. Sounds similar to Office365 PowerPoint webapp (currently in beta). VMware has also begun encroaching on the PaaS space with the release of Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry is VMware's attempt to move into the PaaS space currently occupied by Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.

But with the SlideRocket rocket acquisition, this marks VMware move from PaaS (and of course IaaS) to now offering a end user SaaS application. Presumably SlideRocket will eventually be ported to run on Cloud Foundry just like Office365 will eventually run on Azure, if not already.

A recent Forrester report "Sizing the Cloud" seems to confirm this.  It shows that global IaaS revenue will peak in 2014. But PaaS, and more so SaaS, is where the future money is, according to Forrester.

It will be interesting to see what other SaaS acquisitions VMware pursues. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a SaaS-based word processor and/or spreadsheet acquisition are on the horizon. Or perhaps the SlideRocket acquisition was simply an attempt to excite developers on Cloud Foundry with the hopes of accelerating 3rd party development on it.

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