Acquisitions

SpringSource, a division of VMware, announced that VMware has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone Systems, a privately held provider of enterprise data management solutions based in Beaverton, Oregon.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition will advance SpringSource and VMware’s vision of providing the infrastructure necessary for emerging cloud-centric applications, with built-in availability, scalability, security and performance guarantees. These modern applications require new approaches to data management, given they will be deployed across elastic, highly scalable, geographically distributed architectures. With the addition of GemStone’s data management solutions, customers will be able to make the right data available to the right applications at the right time within a distributed cloud environment.

Today’s news, combined with the recent acquisition of Rabbit Technologie and the recent hiring of Salvatore Sanfilippo, the lead programmer for the open source Redis project, underscores VMware and SpringSource’s understanding of the critical role data management plays in application deployment to the cloud. This acquisition will further SpringSource’s strategy to deliver the application infrastructure required for modern cloud applications.

SpringSource plans to fully support GemStone’s product line and will continue to support all GemStone customers. GemStone’s flagship product is GemFire Enterprise, a scalable, distributed data platform that puts data where it is needed across a network to remove latency. Other GemStone products include GemFire SQLFabric, a memory-oriented SQL data management platform and GemStone/S, a platform for running distributed Smalltalk applications.

IBM recently announced it has acquired Cast Iron Systems to broaden the delivery of cloud computing services for clients.

Cast Iron Systems, a privately held company based in Mountain View, CA, delivers industry-leading cloud integration software, appliances and services.  Financial terms were not disclosed. The acquisition expands IBM’s industry-leading business process and integration software portfolio, which grew more than 20 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

Cast Iron Systems has completed thousands of cloud integrations around the world for financial institutions, media and entertainment companies and retail organizations.  The company’s clients include Allianz, NEC, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Dow Jones, Schumacher Group, ShoreTel, Sports Authority, Time Warner, Westmont University and many others.

In today’s competitive global business environment, companies are recognizing the need to reduce complexity and cost in order to increase their business agility.  To do so, many organizations are accessing key business applications through software as a service models and cloud deployments. IBM expects the global cloud computing market to grow at a compounded annual rate of 28 percent from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012.

A key challenge businesses face in successfully adopting cloud delivery models is integrating the disparate systems running in their data centers with new cloud based applications.  In the past, this involved time-consuming and resource-draining coding work.  Through Cast Iron Systems, IBM is gaining the ability to help businesses rapidly integrate their cloud-based applications and on-premise systems.  The acquisition also advances IBM’s capabilities for a hybrid cloud model, which is attractive to enterprises because it allows them to blend data from on-premise applications with public and private cloud systems.

IBM is already known for the application integration capabilities it offers for both on-premise and business to business applications.  With the addition of Cast Iron Systems to its portfolio, IBM will be able to offer clients a complete platform to integrate cloud applications from providers including Salesforce.com, Amazon, NetSuite and ADP with on-premise applications, such as SAP and JD Edwards.  Using Cast Iron Systems’ hundreds of pre-built templates and services expertise, expensive custom coding can be eliminated, allowing cloud integrations to be completed in the space of days, rather than weeks or longer.  These results can be achieved using a physical appliance, a virtual appliance or a cloud service.

Consistent with IBM’s software strategy, IBM will continue to support and enhance Cast Iron Systems’ technologies and clients while allowing them to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio.  Cast Iron Systems’ approximately 75 employees will be integrated into IBM.

The IBM Software Group has acquired more than 55 companies since 2003.

SpringSource, a division of VMware, yesterday announced the acquisition by VMware of Rabbit Technologies, an open source software company based in the United Kingdom.

SpringSource will add the RabbitMQ open messaging system into its suite of technologies that reduce the complexity associated with development, deployment and management of enterprise applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As organizations increasingly build and deploy applications in a cloud environment, the infrastructure to support this new model is evolving. A new type of lightweight, reliable, scalable and portable messaging system is required to support the routing of user requests to the appropriate resources regardless of where they may reside. RabbitMQ is a leader in this field and with this acquisition, SpringSource will employ the principal contributors to RabbitMQ, the open source standards-based messaging system that enables applications or components of applications to more effectively communicate with each other.

Providing clear integration with the Spring Framework will also allow a significant community of Spring developers to leverage RabbitMQ as they evolve their applications from traditional datacenters into private and public cloud deployments. RabbitMQ will continue to be open source software, and SpringSource plans to continue full support for the RabbitMQ developer community.

Virtustream, a privately held infrastructure services firm, today announced it has acquired two data centers from NaviSite as part of Virtustream’s data center growth strategy and support for itsxStream hybrid enterprise cloud platform.

Virtustream will continue to service existing customers with expanded data center services, and it will offer capacity within the San Francisco, Calif. and Vienna, Va. facilities to new customers, including those that deploy the xStream cloud platform.  Details about the transaction can be found in a related announcement from NaviSite.

Unveiled earlier in March, xStream is the first enterprise cloud platform that delivers cost and resource savings through flexible internal (private) and external (off-premise) cloud environments-commonly referred to as hybrid cloud environments-through one centralized subscription-based deployment, with guaranteed resources, capacity on demand and industry leading SLAs. xStream provides virtual, elastic and externally managed resources for running applications, and it is based on Virtustream’s long track record of successful enterprise virtual IT deployments.

Virtustream not only incorporates higher levels of security than most clients’ own internal systems, but also addresses end user concerns about availability by building redundancy into xStream deployments-data is replicated in real-time in a second data center located in a separate geography. In the event of an issue, services switch to the second data center with minimal interruption.

VMware is to acquire select technologies from parent company EMC, reports TechCrunchIT.

The virtualization juggernaut will essentially be buying up certain technologies from EMC’s Ionix IT management business, including solutions aimed at delivering improved management and deployment of servers and applications in a virtualized data center. VMware will acquire all technology and intellectual property of FastScale, Application Discovery Manager, Server Configuration Manager and Service Manager.

As part of the agreement, EMC will retain the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights to continue to offer customers the products acquired by VMware.

The transaction is valued at $200 million and is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2010.