VMware announces the acquisition of Socialcast

VMware CTO Steve Herrod announced on May 31 the acquisition of Socialcast. Socialcast is an enterprise social networking software vendor, such as Yammer, Salesforce and Jive.

The Socialcast acquisition is the last of a serie which included the cloud-based online presentation company Sliderocket and the groupware company Zimbra.

VMware recently added Single Sign On (SSO) support to VMware Horizon App Manager, which aims to be the keystone for enabling and managing the cloud applications nowadays commonly used by enterprise employees. Socialcast software is not yet integrated into Horizon App Manager, but surely will be supported soon.

All these moves, together with the two recent posts of VMware CTO Steve Harrod on the “post-PC era” (1, 2), bring new evidence on what is going to be the new role of VMware on the market, shifting from being a mere provider to becoming an enabler for virtualization and cloud technologies, as this article from Gartner analyst Chris Wolf points out.