Mountain View, California — Stepping up its battle against Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. hoping to gain strong footing as a leader in cloud-computing, last week upped the ante by announcing the acquisition of DocVerse — a startup company founded by Microsoft veterans that allow for real-time editing and sharing of Office documents online.
Financial terms of the deal were not revealed, but according to reports in The Wall Street Journal quoted rumors that the search giant paid around $25 million for the San Francisco-based company, according to a person familiar with the matter.
In an interview, Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager for Google Apps, said Google acquired DocVerse to simplify it for people to transition from desktop software to online software. “With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint desktop applications,” Rochelle, wrote in a blog post.
Google considers that the “future of productivity applications is in the cloud,” but the company perceives that some people are still accustomed to desktop software, Rochelle wrote. “So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we are also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and inter-operate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office,” he said.
Google will introduce DocVerse’s technology as part of its Google Apps, Rochelle said, empowering users who upload Microsoft files into Google storage to edit and collaborate on them. Google also made the software, which carried fees for some types of usage, free and temporarily suspended new sign-ups.
DocVerse was founded nearly 3 years ago by two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, which promises a “novel way to work by seamlessly plugging into Microsoft Office,” and allows people engage in web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.
The company in its first round of funding in 2008 has raised about $1.5 million in venture financing from Baseline Ventures and others, and its advisory board includes executives from Microsoft, Adobe, and Google, according to the DocVerse Web site.
In an interview, Sinha said DocVerse is tempted to help foster Google Apps as an effective service for collaborating across different files types. While noting that Microsoft is also developing ways for people to collaborate on files online, he said Google is “better positioned to reinvent Web-based business software” than Microsoft and executing “more effectively and quickly.”
“DocVerse is a small, nimble team of talented developers who share our vision, and they have enabled true collaboration right within Microsoft Office,” Rochelle said.
“We have always considered the web is the best platform for creating and sharing information,” Rochelle added. “But we recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software.” Rochelle’s team recently made it possible to use Google Docs to store and share any type of file that users have on their computer, in addition to the ones they create online.
A Microsoft spokeswoman said in a statement that Google’s DocVerse deal concedes that “customers want to use and collaborate with Microsoft Office documents.” The statement continued to say that “businesses around the world” are using Microsoft’s collaboration service, SharePoint, citing Coca Cola Enterprises, Kraft and Volvo as examples.
“For the many people who use desktop software, like Microsoft Office, switching to the cloud was a challenge,” DocVerse co-founders Sinha and DeNeui said in a joint statement on Friday. “Unfortunately, today, individuals are still forced to make a choice between those two worlds … Even worse, teams who use both products find that Office and web applications do not play well together … Google’s acquisition of DocVerse represents a first step to solve these problems.”
DocVerse acquisition is the latest one in a string of around a half dozen acquisitions that Google has announced since the end of 2009. In January, Google announced that Google Docs users could upload any type of file and access it via the cloud. The service provides up to 1GB of free storage, with any additional files costing $0.25 per GB per year. Earlier this month, the company bought photo-editing site Picnik.
The cloud is the domain where Google is attempting to gain a strong foothold over Microsoft, with its Google Apps service, which includes online word-processing and spreadsheet software.