VMWare Buys Online Presentation Service SlideRocket

VMware on April 26 acquired a new whiz-bang feature to add to its growing stock of cloud-based products: SlideRocket, an online business-presentation service that competes directly against Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe PDF.

Terms of the transaction to purchase the 25-person, San Francisco-based company were not disclosed by VMware.

SlideRocket, founded in 2007, is currently being used by about 20,000 licensees and distributed to some 300,000 users to create, share and store presentations in the cloud.

The services enables users to create presentations and easily add such features as video, Twitter feeds, various types of charts and graphs, and embedded financial data widgets with real-time information updates, SlideRocket founder and CTO Mitch Grasso told eWEEK.

"This is all about taking this 25-year-old technology that’s PowerPoint and reinventing it for the Web," Grasso told eWEEK. "This really brings the ability to integrate collaboration as it needs to be with the tools and to provide different levels of security and analytics that weren’t possible with a desktop tool.

"It also allows the move into mobile—both for authoring and consuming a presentation, and just improving the authoring experience across the board."

Presentation software is second only to email as the most widely used business software, VMware VP and General Manager Brian Byun said.

For more, read the eWEEK article: VMware Acquires SlideRocket for Online Presentations.