Cloud Computing: VMware Sells SlideRocket To ClearSlide
March 6, 2013
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.
VMware has sold SlideRocket, fewer than two years after its acquisition, to ClearSlide, a San Francisco firm that provides a company’s sales force with a sales engagement platform.
SlideRocket’s online and interactive slide presentation service, a kind of PowerPoint on steroids, is expected to be used to augment the ClearSlide platform. The move marks the end of a brief era in which VMware spoke confidently of a future in which virtualized and online applications — some of which VMware planned to originate — displaced those of the personal computing era. Microsoft Office only grew more entrenched during the time.
Prior to offloading SlideRocket, Javier Soltero, VMware’s earliest and most outspoken spokesman for that short-lived era, had moved on to greener pastures. Soltero was CEO of the Hyperic cloud monitoring service, acquired by VMware with SpringSource, and is now entrepreneur in residence at Redpoint Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif…
SlideRocket reportedly had 25-30 employees when VMware acquired it in April 2011; it was a two-year-old startup at the time. It grew 400% while inside VMware, and many of those employees will make the transition to ClearSlide, which currently has 150 employees and is headed for 250 by the end of the year…
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