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SpringSource Snapped Up By VMware

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(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.

CA Buys Large Part Of Cassatt

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Remember our post about data center management software firm Cassatt Corproation being “close to the end” as quoted by the company’s founder and CEO Bill Coleman?

Well Computer Associates just announced the acquisition of certain data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets from Cassatt, a provider of innovative cloud computing software that makes data centers more efficient. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cassatt’s Rob Gingell, executive vice president of Product Development and Chief Technology Officer, and Steve Oberlin, Chief Scientist and co-founder, have joined CA, along with their team of developers, engineers, and other key employees. In addition, CA has acquired several Cassatt patents and patent applications, as well as other intellectual property.

CA’s business-driven automation solution helps customers reduce capital and operating costs and improve service quality by enabling dynamic, real-time response to changing business demands. The solution is instrumental in increasing business agility, service quality and control, as well as helping to reduce risk and human error, lower costs, and improve IT efficiency. By this optimization of value, CA automation helps customers achieve Lean IT.

EMC To Buy Configuresoft

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EMC today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Configuresoft, a provider of server configuration, change and compliance management software. The transaction is expected to close in June, subject to customary closing conditions and is not expected to have a material impact to revenue or EPS for the full 2009 fiscal year.

The announcement builds upon an already successful OEM relationship with Configuresoft. EMC entered this OEM agreement in mid-2008 and the resulting products of EMC Server Configuration Manager and EMC Configuration Analytics Manager are currently helping customers quickly adopt virtualization, dramatically cut costs, monitor policy and security compliance, and ensure governance, risk and compliance (GRC) across their infrastructures.

Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) and Configuration Intelligent Analytics (CIA) — which will continue to be known as EMC Server Configuration Manager and Configuration Analytics Manager based upon the OEM agreement — help companies achieve and maintain continuous operational, regulatory, and security compliance across their data centers. The solutions are able to quickly detect, prioritize and correct configuration compliance issues and help companies implement an automated, continuous enterprise compliance posture. Rich analytics offer customers a powerful dashboard for viewing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and provide visibility across network and server domains.

Taking this one step further, by offering powerful integrations with EMC’s network change and configuration management and service management solutions — as well the company’s automated root-cause analysis and application dependency mapping software — customers gain total visibility and control across their physical and virtual IT infrastructure.

Springsource Snaps Up Web App Monitoring And Management Software Maker Hyperic

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Enterprise Java house Springsource today announced it has acquired substantially all of the assets of Hyperic, the open source leader in web application and infrastructure management (see our earlier coverage). With the acquisition, SpringSource offers a comprehensive product set for powering the entire Java application lifecycle, with lean and powerful solutions for building, running and managing enterprise applications. By accelerating and unifying the application lifecycle from developer to data center and bridging the divide between development and IT operations teams, SpringSource can meet all the needs of companies building and deploying business-critical Java applications.

San Francisco-based Hyperic, provides web application performance management software that is used by numerous Fortune 1000 entities, including many of the world’s largest SaaS and consumer web companies. Hyperic’s solutions monitor and manage the performance and availability of the entire application stack from hardware and operating systems to virtual machines, web servers, application servers, databases, and more — giving IT and web operations a unified view and control of the performance and health of their entire web infrastructure.

SpringSource has a successful track record incorporating open source technologies into its offerings, creating the industry’s most comprehensive and productive solution set for the entire Java application lifecycle while supporting and contributing to the related open source communities. With the acquisition, SpringSource solutions now cover the entire application lifecycle including:

  • Build
    SpringSource leads enterprise Java innovation with Spring, the de facto standard programming model for enterprise Java applications. More than half of the Fortune 500 power their Java applications with Spring, and about two thirds of all Java developers use Spring. More than 70 percent of enterprises cite improved productivity, faster project completion, improved portability and application quality as top reasons for using Spring. SpringSource is driving even higher levels of innovation with Groovy and Grails, a dynamic language web application stack offering productivity benefits rivaling Ruby on Rails, but on a proven and scalable Spring-powered Java platform.
  • Run
    SpringSource is at the forefront of rapid enterprise adoption of lightweight application server runtimes and contributes 95 percent of bug fixes to Apache Tomcat, the most popular application server with 68 percent usage across IT organizations. SpringSource tc Server is an enterprise version of Tomcat that provides developers with the lightweight server they want paired with the operational, management and diagnostic capabilities businesses need to deploy Tomcat widely across the enterprise. SpringSource is also ensuring enterprise Java runtimes are prepared to handle virtualized and cloud computing needs with SpringSource dm Server, the leading OSGi-based Java server for modular next-generation applications.
  • Manage
    Businesses require application management and monitoring capabilities that provide deep and transparent insight into application performance and service levels as requests flow through the web servers, application servers, databases, message queues and other application infrastructure deployed on physical, virtual, and cloud computing platforms. With the addition of Hyperic, SpringSource is uniquely positioned to address modern application requirements and provide the single source of insight behind the behavior and performance of every layer of an application. Thousands of companies worldwide already depend on Hyperic for their web application and infrastructure management as well as their IT service level commitments.

“This is the marriage of two companies that share a common vision for the future of enterprise solutions and the application lifecycle. SpringSource is the default choice for many developers and IT architects creating Java applications, and Hyperic is the default choice for many IT operations professionals that need to manage those applications,” said Javier Soltero, formerly CEO of Hyperic and now CTO of Management Products at SpringSource. “Managing Enterprise Java requires visibility up and down the stack and across a company’s network and data center, including virtualization and cloud computing environments. The divide that separates development from IT operations has just become a lot smaller.”

(Via CNET)

The 451 Group Snaps Up Research Firm Moss Creek Capital

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The 451 Group has acquired independent equity-research firm Moss Creek Capital in order to expand its services for the professional investment community. Dallas-based Moss Creek provides investment research on publicly traded software companies, offering actionable insight gleaned from conversations with end users, key players in the software distribution channel and company executives. Moss Creek principal Gregg Speicher will remain with the acquired firm.

The acquisition expands the coverage and financial expertise of The 451 Group, an independent analyst firm that covers emerging technologies within the enterprise IT industry.

“The addition of Moss Creek will accelerate our efforts to explain to investors how disruptive technologies will affect large and small public companies,” said Martin V. McCarthy, CEO of The 451 Group. “With major forces such as cloud computing gathering on the horizon, we believe that investors are hungry for deep insight into which companies are going to be winners and losers in the resulting market. We will continue to look for opportunities to expand our firm, and we expect to complete additional acquisitions this year.”

IBM Walks Away From Talks Over Potential Sun Acquisition

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IBM has withdrawn its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems today (Sunday), reports the NY Times, who confirmed the collapse of the talks based on a statement from an unnamed source while several other media, including the Wall Street Journal and ZDNet, were still speculating. The New York Times correctly points out this leaves Sun free to pursue other opportunities for selling itself.

Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers.

In their talks, I.B.M. and Sun had a contract to deal with each other exclusively. Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers.

It will be interesting to watch the market react to this on Monday morning.