Hoping to further secure its position as leader in cloud-computing, Google on Friday announced the acquisition of DocVerse -- a startup that helps users collaborate on Microsoft Office documents online.

"They've enabled true collaboration right within Microsoft Office," Jonathan Rochelle, Group Product Manager at Google Apps team, said of DocVerse in a blog post on Friday.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reported rumors of a $25 million purchase price.

"We've always believed 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.

Launched nearly 3 years ago, DocVerse lets people engage in Web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.

"For the many people who use desktop software, like Microsoft Office, transitioning to the cloud was a challenge," DocVerse co-founders Shan Sinha and Alex 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."

Current DocVerse users will be able to keep using the product as usual, but Google has suspended new sign-ups so it can realign the offerings.

Rather than software, files and digital services being tied to an individual computer, cloud computing makes them ubiquitously accessible via the Web. The technology is seen to be particularly important to the future of mobile, because it makes vast amounts of data available without requiring its "physical" storage.

John Herlihy, Google's VP of global ad operations, said this week that cloud-computing will soon guarantee that every mobile device will be capable of handling the most advanced applications, thus demoting desktops to doorstop status.

The DocVerse news comes on the heels of Google's acquisition of another cloud-focused startup, Picnik. The Web site lets users edit photos online, and then save their changes "in the cloud" -- before sharing them immediately via Facebook or MySpace.

Shan co-founded DocVerse after leaving Microsoft, where he drove product strategy for SharePoint and SQL Server. Likewise, DeNeui spent three years at Microsoft, where he drove SQL Server's web strateg before co-founding DocVerse.

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