(We’re playing catch-up on news due to holiday, apologies for the late notices)
VMware recently announced a major step forward in its journey to help simplify IT by entering into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management. VMware and SpringSource, itself an acquiring party earlier this year when it purchased Hyperic, plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.
VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.
SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools. In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.
Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers. These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future.
Although this acquisition is interesting, and there is a very compelling story here if we think about AppSpeed as well, the issue is that people are virtualizing today and need the platform, application, and automation that this might yield in 24 months TODAY! Will be interesting to see if VMWARE will integrate this IP faster than the BeeHive (AppSpeed) IP.
uptime software will be at VMworld 2009 in San Fran this year, please feel free to drop by for a chat in person. We have a very cool VMworld promo, as we are giving away more than $80k of up.time 5 IT Systems Management software at the booth. http://www.uptimesoftware.com/VMworld-2009.php