VMware buys SpringSource: did anyone see that one coming?

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

Recently the technology world has been abound with mergers and acquisitions and rumours of mergers and acquisitions. The more things change the more things stay the same. But VMware acquiring SpringSource is a BIG change. Of course, the level of consolidation among tech companies continues to rage on in 2009, but not since not since Oracle’s purchase of Sun have we seen such an expansionist acquisition as VMware gobbling up SpringSource for $US362 million.

If you want to keep track of them all, add TechWorld’s “mergers & acquisitions” tag to your RSS reader.

If we turn the clock back a few years VMware was purchased by EMC to bolster its software assets.

VMware, like EMC’s hardware, is still in the infrastructure layer, but it gave EMC a whole new dimension and market opportunity. EMC is high-end, VMware scales down to the small business level.

With SpringSource coming into the fold, EMC/VMware has lifted itself another level to play in the application infrastructure space.

What this means is VMware is now squarely in the realm of the application server providers like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle (bought BEA and Sun), Red Hat (JBoss), and a whole host of public cloud computing providers like Google and Amazon.

This move really solidifies VMware’s ambitions as a modern software company so who knows where the acquisition trail will end.

It’s also interesting from a source code perspective.

VMware is predominantly a proprietary software company and SpringSource is one of a new breed of “commercial open source” companies that offer “commercially supported” versions of open source products.

SringSource’s portfolio includes Apache Tomcat, Groovy, Grails, Spring Framework, and more recently Hyperic for systems management.

That’s not to say VMware will struggle to support SpringSource’s open source Java ecosystem. The company already manages a few open source projects, including a Java API for vSphere, but it’s certainly a huge validation of open source software for mission-critical workloads.

VMware may scoff at free hypervisors, but with Xen and KVM (and Hyper-V on Windows) all being shipped by and supported by the operating system vendors more pressure will be put on the third-party VMware.

And as Microsoft, Red Hat and Novell move more into the virtualisation and application server markets where does that leave VMware? Well, now VMware has a competing offering.

When viewed from that angle perhaps the acquisition seems like a natural one.

Incidentally, congratulations to Rod Johnston, an Australian who founded SpringSource. Hopefully Rod continues the success of SpringSource now it is under VMware’s wing.