There is an oft-repeated story about the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and the dancer Isadora Duncan.

Ms. Duncan suggested the exciting possibilities of their marriage: "Think of our child; with your brains and my body, what a wonder it would be."

Bernard Shaw replied, "Yes, but what if it had my body and your brains?"

As the tale of social vendor Socialcast illustrates, vendor M&A does not always deliver the best of both worlds either. To begin at the beginning...

The last few years have seen much jostling among social software vendors to become “twitter for the enterprise.” Early on, one of the contenders for this title was Socialcast, and its activity stream-oriented software found a fair bit of adoption among both small and large enterprises. The success of the company attracted a suitor in the form of VMware.

VMWare is of course the emperor of the virtualization world. VMware’s technology and products find favor with many enterprise IT departments, it has established relationships and deeper pockets (compared to the much smaller Socialcast), and itself was growing at a fast clip. Also, note that storage heavyweight EMC owns about 80% of VMware.  

So, in May 2011, when the acquisition of Socialcast by VMWare was announced, it was widely expected (and justifiably so) that Socialcast would be able to punch above its weight as it now had access to greater resources to support a real breakout.

However, after about a year, we wonder if that promise has been realized.

• The core product lumbers on with incremental (but not earth shattering) enhancements
• Progress on its social project management tool, "Strides," seems rather slow (originally conceived in 2010, announced in September 2011 but still in Beta)
• Tellingly, Socialcast does not find a mention in the product list on VMware website.

As the social software space matures and we see broader dispersion of product features and functionality, vendor intangibles become an increasingly important differentiator.  Our advice in all such situations may seem nothing more than common sense, but will stand you in good stead: get as much concrete detail as possible on product roadmaps, and do as much diligence on the vendor as you do on the technology.