I mentioned in a previous blog post I believe VMware is building (rather acquiring) an Office365 competitive offering as they move from being an IaaS vendor to a PaaS and SaaS vendor. Today VMware announced their acquisition of SocialCast, an enterprise collaboration tool. SocialCast is offered as on premise, private cloud or SaaS.
I liken SocialCast to Office365's SharePoint offering, but with notable differences such as CRM and ERP integration. So in my mind here's where VMware is at today.
Outlook/Exchange = Zimbra
SharePoint = SocialCast
PowerPoint = SlideRocket
Word = ??? TBD
Excel = ??? TBD
I am over generalizing the comparisions but you get the idea. Any bets on what the future VMware acquisitions will be? Perhaps a Word and Excel equivalent? I would also bet that VMware is looking at porting these applications to CloudFoundry and building a future product/brand offering around them, along with requisite management tools.
They are also putting together an impressive portfolio in the App. Dev space.
ReplyDeleteSince acquiring Spring Source, they have also picked up most of the Team behind Tomcat, to offer their TC server. Then they have added the Team behind AspectJ. And more recently the Grails project too.
IMO, AspectJ is probably one of the most compelling, and most significant innovations in the software development space over the last decade.