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Virtustream Appoints Former VMware Exec Jeff Miller As Chief Sales Officer

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Virtustream, a cloud solutions provider, has announced that Jeff Miller has joined its executive team as Chief Sales Officer with global responsibility for the company’s sales operations.

Miller joins Virtustream from the SpringSource division of VMware, where he served as VP of sales, Americas.

Prior to VMware, Miller was at SpringSource up to its acquisition by VMware; he was instrumental in integrating SpringSource’s open source solutions into VMware’s vFabric cloud application development framework.

Prior to SpringSource, Miller managed sales divisions for Novell, desktop integration provider OpenSpan and JBoss.

Virtustream provides a full range of cloud services to assess customer infrastructure requirements and make specific vendor and technology agnostic recommendations regarding cloud deployments.

VMware Acquires WaveMaker To Ease App Development For Non-Coders

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VMWare has acquired WaveMaker, the result of discussions that have been going on between the latter and the SpringSource division of VMware for more than a year.

WaveMaker is based on the Spring framework but targets a different audience: non-expert developers looking for the easiest way to build web apps.

All of WaveMaker’s staff will be joining VMware.

VMware Introduces vFabric Cloud Application Platform

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VMware at VMworld introduced its cloud application platform strategy and solutions, enabling developers to build and run modern applications that intelligently share information with underlying infrastructure to maximize application performance, quality of service and infrastructure utilization.

VMware vFabric cloud application platform combines the market-leading Spring Java development framework with platform services including lightweight application server, global data management, cloud-ready messaging, dynamic load balancing and application performance management. Applications built on VMware vFabric provide performance and portability across heterogeneous cloud environments.

Principles that have defined today’s most demanding consumer applications – built-in scalability, new data models, distributed infrastructures – are heavily influencing the production of new internal customer enterprise applications.  As such, these modern applications need to support dynamic user interactions, low-latency data access and virtual infrastructure all while meeting the security and compliance demands of the enterprise.  VMware vFabric is uniquely optimized for cloud computing’s increasingly dynamic architectures, unlike traditional middleware that requires complete stack control.

Applications are increasingly built with modern development frameworks that leverage runtime and data management services that are much more agile and designed for virtualization. An open solution, VMware vFabric will initially target the 2.5 million users that develop Spring Java applications. VMware vFabric will deliver the following key benefits:

  • Maximize Speed and Innovation: Customers can bring modern applications to market faster and with less complexity; new applications can be delivered in days or weeks rather than months or years, and at scale.
  • Extend the Benefits of Virtualization to the Application: VMware vFabric can coordinate with underlying infrastructure to help ensure optimal application performance, quality of service and infrastructure resource utilization.
  • An Evolutionary Path to the Cloud: Developers will be able to build new applications in a familiar and productive way while enabling the choice of where to run them, whether on premise or in public clouds such as VMforce or Google.

Spring can speed development by more than 50 percent through developer tools and features that make it easy to create new applications that:

  • Provide a rich, modern user experience across a range of platforms, browsers and personal devices
  • Integrate applications using proven Enterprise Application Integration patterns, including batch processing
  • Access data in a wide range of structured and unstructured formats
  • Leverage popular social media services and cloud service APIs

The VMware cloud application platform delivers modern middleware infrastructure to developers, application architects and IT teams as a collection of cloud-scale, integrated services:

  • Lightweight Application Server: tc Server, an enterprise version of Apache Tomcat, is optimized for Spring and VMware vSphere and can be instantaneously provisioned to meet the scalability needs of modern applications.
  • Data Management Services: GemFire speeds application performance and eliminates database bottlenecks by providing real-time access to globally distributed data.
  • Cloud-Ready Messaging Service: RabbitMQ facilitates communications between applications inside and outside the datacenter.
    Dynamic Load Balancer: ERS, an enterprise version Apache web server, helps ensure optimal performance by distributing and balancing application load.
  • Application Performance Management: Hyperic enables proactive performance management through transparent visibility into modern applications deployed across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

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.

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)

SpringSource Partners Up With VMware For Spring-Powered Enterprise Virtualization Offering

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SpringSource today announced at SpringOne Americas 2008 a new relationship with VMware that will help organizations to seamlessly develop and deploy Spring applications in VMware virtualized environments.

The collaboration with VMware, a SpringSource Certified Solutions Partner, includes integration between SpringSource Tool Suite, an Eclipse-powered development environment for building enterprise applications using the Spring Portfolio, and VMware Workstation to enable the dynamic creation of virtual machines on developer desktops.

SpringSource is also developing two open source application-server virtual appliances – the SpringSource tc Server and dm Server virtual appliances. When run on VMware Infrastructure, these appliances will enable the portability of enterprise Java applications across desktop and data center environments. SpringSource dm Server is a completely modular, OSGi-based Java server designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability. SpringSource tc Server is the enterprise version of Apache Tomcat – the most widely used Java application server – hardened for enterprise use and coupled with mission-critical operational capabilities and support that systems administrators require.

SpringSource Tool Suite integration with VMware Workstation will enable development and QA professionals to quickly and easily specify virtual server configurations for different development and test scenarios. These virtual appliances will allow developers to select a variety of build targets with different operating systems and application server configurations without needing additional physical hardware – dramatically accelerating software development times and reducing hardware costs. Virtual appliance configuration, deployment and debugging will be integrated with the SpringSource Tool Suite, and ready-to-use virtual images will be provided for dm Server, tc Server and Apache Tomcat.

The first SpringSource/VMware commercial offerings are scheduled for availability in January 2009.