It's been a busy time for M&A activity and VMware continued its social shopping spree with the purchase of Enterprise 2.0 vendor Socialcast recently. The purchase comes on the heels of two other buys including SlideRocket and Zimbra.

For VMware, the purchase makes sense as it becomes increasingly social. For Socialcast, it puts it in the stable of a large company at a time when it's becoming increasingly difficult for small Enterprise 2.0 vendors to differentiate themselves from the pack.

Socialcast CEO Tim Young wrote on the company blog that this is a great fit for both companies. "VMware and Socialcast are a natural fit for each other. Both companies seek to transform the way that employees work in an increasingly mobile, virtual landscape. We share the same vision for the future of collaboration - secure access to data, access on-the-go via mobile devices and remote workspaces, and support for modern work streams that are increasingly more iterative and interconnected," Young wrote.

What's more, Socialcast is tightly linked to VMware with 40 percent of its customers running it on a VMware virtual machine.

For Brian Byun, VMware's vice president and general manager, Cloud Applications, this is about bringing integrated collaboration tools to VMware's enterprise customers. "For enterprise collaboration to improve business outcomes it can't just be a feature in a single application. Organizations need a new social collaboration fabric across the applications people already work with. Socialcast combines real-time activity streams that are contextually integrated within existing enterprise systems. This is the new way to work," he said.

And of course that collaboration will be driven by cloud and mobile.

The price of the deal was not available.

For more information:
- see the VMware press release

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