Despite building momentum in the private and hybrid cloud space, VMware is best known as a virtualization technology developer. That’s why I was scratching my head for a few minutes when I found out VMware acquired SlideRocket, a cloud-based presentation tool. But on further reflection, this could turn out to be an inspired move for VMware, as it prepares to compete with Microsoft SharePoint on its home turf: the slide presentation.

First off, VMware is getting into the cloud platform game with its Cloud Foundry initiative. That already puts the company into competition with the Microsoft Windows Azure PaaS platform. Being able to offer enterprise SaaS such as SlideRocket’s offering on top of it makes perfect sense. And since it’s privately hostable, it may have an edge in some use cases over public cloud offerings such as Microsoft Office 365, which includes SharePoint Online.

The dots all connect: VMware only recently made its Zimbra e-mail offering available to channel partners. And it’s easy to see how the Zimbra and SlideRocket offerings might fit together as the foundation of a suite of private cloud collaboration tools. While the official presentation announcing the acquisition wasn’t naming names, it’s pretty clear VMware is looking to take on Microsoft.

As ever, adoption rates will tell the tale. Cloud service providers: Would you be interested in a VMware-provided, privately hosted cloud collaboration suite?

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