VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, announced the acquisition of social communications platform Socialcast. Socialcast, a leading provider of social collaboration solutions for the enterprise, ensures modern business communication by uniting people, information and enterprise applications within collaborative communities.

The terms of the acquisition were not announced.

Socialcast is the latest entity to be acquired by the cloud leader, as VMware recently completed the acquisitions of SlideRocket and Zimbra (News - Alert) along with the introduction of VMware Horizon App Manager, in helping advance VMware's vision for a modern end-user computing model. VMware works to transform the traditional PC desktop by equipping today's mobile workforce with secure access to applications and data from any location and any device, while driving increased productivity through modern collaboration and communication models, according to company officials.

When the acquisition is complete, the new model will support modern work streams that are “increasingly more iterative and interconnected, as information is assembled and coordinated among virtual teams that cut across organizations.”

“The post-PC era will be defined by a new way to work that is increasingly social, real-time and collaborative," said Brian Byun, vice president and general manager, Cloud Applications, VMware. "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."

According to company officials, enterprises face a myriad of challenges with the rise of cloud computing and the coming post-PC era. Most importantly, enterprises have to figure out how to provide secure access to a burgeoning mobile workforce and how to manage the increasingly diverse data, applications and devices needed to run businesses.

Socialcast – which can be delivered as a hosted service, private cloud implementation, or through an on-premise solution – offers a solution to these challenges and the platform has already been deployed by some of the world's largest enterprises including Avaya, Humana, Nokia (News - Alert), Philips Electronics, SAS and VMware.

"The future of work will be focused on people-centric collaboration, bringing diverse groups of employees together to accelerate business performance," said Timothy Young, founder and CEO of Socialcast, in a statement. "We've seen Socialcast transform the way that people work at some of the world's largest companies, and we're excited to bring the benefits of social computing to VMware's more than 250,000 customers."