“We are looking at the way cloud computing changes the way people work,” Soltero said in an interview. “With vSphere, we changed life for sysadmins and the way they looked at physical hardware. Cloud Foundry changed the way developers work, and now we want to change the way the end-user experiences his computing. Our strategy is expanding and taking shape with presentations being a core currency in business today.”

SlideRocket, a four-year-old startup that has raised $7 million in funding, offers its software to about 300,000 active users at the moment. It offers both a free version and a paid enterprise version, and Mitch Grasso, founder and CTO of SlideRocket, says sales of the paid version were growing 35 percent month-over-month. With the marketing muscle VMware can now put behind it, he expects conversion rates to increase. Grasso said for now, normal users won’t see any big changes, and he hopes to continue pushing features on the product to users now that it has more resources behind it, with mobile becoming a key area. The plan is to ensure people can view and create rich presentations on tablets and handsets.

As for VMware’s next buys, Soltero was cagey about what he perceived to be the holes in VMware’s application strategy. My hunch is an enterprise social networking product, which is becoming more and more important to enterprise customers, and perhaps an Excel-style spreadsheet or data platform might make sense. SlideRocket was backed by Azure Capital Partners and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and has 25 employees.

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The simplicity will drive adoption, especially as employees bring in “rogue” software that is virally adopted amongst other workers. And then once it reaches a significant level of adoption, then IT generally steps in and realizes that such consumer-like SaaS collaboration software can be delivered more securely and takes control. As Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box.net said, “We’re experiencing a revolution in the enterprise.” And as part of the revolution, large companies will be created and those with success as platforms will be simple to use and also link to other platforms. As Chuck Dietrich, SlideRocket’s CEO, said, “If you’re an online app, how can you not have APIs?”

However, the bottom line for these vendors was that the emergence of real collaboration and cloud platforms is enabling startups like them to disrupt the marketplace with a different type of product for enterprise communication — a product that is easier for people to use and likely easier for the IT organization to pay for and maintain. Viva la revolution.

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Users within an organization can have access to shared folders and libraries that they can use to put together presentations that are customized to a specific audience while retaining the organization’s graphic look and content. So, for example, if a salesperson uses a particular slide containing statistics and that data changes, it can be updated in one place; all presentations using that slide will be updated accordingly. Similarly, if a company changes its logo or graphic design, presentations can be automatically changed to reflect the new look.

SlideRocket was one of the first services to be integrated with Google Apps; users can incorporate documents and spreadsheets directly into presentations. Existing presentations can be imported from PowerPoint and Google Presentation.

The interface for putting together presentations is surprisingly simple and intuitive. Without leaving SlideRocket, one can search for images through Flickr, or through its own library of stock images.

Presentations can be made public, embedded into web pages, or can be shared with specific colleagues or clients. SlideRocket offers detailed analytics that allow tracking of who looked at what. And yes, presentations can also be printed or turned into PDFs; of course, interactivity will be lost.

At present, SlideRocket presentations continue to be Flash-based. However, the developer is preparing an HTML5 version that will be available on platforms, like the iPad, that don’t support Flash.

You can see a sample presentation or a video. Pricing plans include a free “lite” version with limited features, a “pro” version for $24 per user per month, and an “enterprise” version that is priced per user. A 14-day trial is available. Google Apps admins can make the trial or full version available to their users through the Google Apps Marketplace.

Do you use SlideRocket? What do you think?

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SlideRocket has always offered a a feature rich authoring tool with all of the bells and whistles you would expect, if not more. With today’s release they up the ante by adding powerful collaboration features and an integrated marketplace.

Collaboration:

Even in a small organization, preparing a slide deck is usually a collaborative process, or at the very least involves the sharing of frequently used assets. SlideRocket’s new collaboration functionality gives you all the tools you need to collect and share your content including library management, content synchronization, and version control.

The library lets you collect frequently used items and assign permissions across your group as to who has access to what items.

Powerful versioning functionality keeps track of changes and lets you revert back to prior copies at the slide and presentation level.

The SlideRocket Marketplace:

Also launched today is the integrated marketplace, a store within SlideRocket which allows you to browse and buy presentation related assets and services such as images, templates, printing and more. Initial partners include Fotolia, Mimeo and PresentationPro with many more planned.

One of the most intriguing features is the built in analytic tools. See who is viewing your decks, how long they spent on each slide as well as tracking clicks and forwards. Rather than sending your presentations out blind, you can now track their effectiveness.

SlideRocket runs in any browser across multiple operating systems, in addition to offering an offline player so you can present on the go without an internet connection.

SlideRocket is offering limited time discounts on their pricing plans from free limited functionality single user accounts up to fully featured Business plans from $20/user per month. Pre-paid annual subscriptions are eligible for further discounts.

Are you still using PowerPoint or Keynote? Could SlideRocket be an option for you?

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SlideRocket, the online presentation designer and manager we raved about back in March has flipped opened their doors and entered an open public beta phase.

SlideRocket offers an extremely impressive set of tools for creating and distributing presentations, and as they move into this next phase they have also added some really nice collaboration functionality that lets you share presentations, slides and specific assets with others in your organization.

Take the online tour and then grab your free beta account – if you’re looking to make an impression with your next presentation, SlideRocket won’t disappoint.

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Enter SlideRocket, a new entrant into the online presentation arena. This rich internet application is said to resemble Apple’s Keynote in its use of transitions, reflections, and fonts.

SlideRocket uses Flex technology from Adobe and includes a client that allows for offline access to presentations. Whether you’re on a plane or otherwise away from an internet connection, you can edit your SlideRocket presentations. This is something Google Presentations doesn’t offer at the moment.

This application is at home in the online environment, easily showing live-updating information from Google Docs/Spreadsheets, pictures off Flickr, and photos from a media folder that is shared by your presentation collaborators. SlideRocket also offers asset management, delivery and analytics tools, all in their hosted environment. There is even a mobile client that allows viewing of a presentation on a WAP-enabled mobile phone.

Like Google Documents, it’s easy to invite people to collaborate with you on your SlideRocket presentation. Version control is built in to the SlideRocket client. Assets and presentations can be tagged for easy lookup in the future. When viewing a presentation, SlideRockets allows you to gather feedback from users through comments and poll results.

It’s great to see a presentation app that blends the features from Microsoft PowerPoint but with some of the flashy features of other online applications. The offline client makes this a viable alternative to Google Presentations and perhaps even Microsoft PowerPoint.

SlideRocket is currently in private beta. Look for service plans to be $12/month for an individual or $50/month for business who want to have SlideRocket available for an entire team.

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