VMware Acquires SpringSource for $420 Million - Industry Reactions (Updated)

by Scott Delap on Aug 11, 2009 |

Today VMware announced they have acquired SpringSource for a mix of approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. From the press release:

..."VMware has led the modernization of datacenter infrastructures through innovative virtualization and cloud architectures, providing customers with cost savings, agility and choice," said Rod Johnson, chief executive officer, SpringSource. "The SpringSource team and community are committed to revolutionizing the way companies build, run and manage applications. By combining forces, I'm confident that we'll be able to deliver a set of truly remarkable solutions that dramatically simplify enterprise IT."...

SpringSource founder Rod Johnson also follows up on the SpringSource blog:

...And so the question becomes, what is the most simple, powerful, pragmatic way of utilizing SpringSource technologies in the data center, and in the cloud? This is an area that we believe presents another opportunity for game-changing innovation ... Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a Platform as a Service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform...

In the blog post Johnson also notes that he expects SpringSource's contributions to open source to continue and increase. Steve Herrod, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D at VMware, has also commented on the acquisition.

InfoQ will continue to cover industry reactions as they become available...

Reactions

RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady thinks the acquisition is about growth for VMware...

Enomaly's Reuven Cohen speculates about the SpringSource acquisition being about VMware's Platform as a Service strategy.

Techcrunch Notes that Benchmark Capital had a big day with the SpringSource acquisition and FriendFriend as well.

The first analysis from the always respected RedMonk...

The Burton Group sees SpringSource retooling as a Cloud-Native platform...

Mike Laverick thinks possible SpringSource / Microsoft Azure collaboration is now dead...

Analysts see price as expensive based on revenue multipliers...others see deal as VMware expanding beyond pure viritualization.

CNet's Matt Asay see's Red Hat vulnerable after VMware's move...

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Community comments

WOW!!!! by Floyd Marinescu Posted

Re: WOW!!!! by Ric Smtih Posted

Re: WOW!!!! by Dave Rooney Posted

Re: WOW!!!! by Rajesh k Posted

Well deserved congrats to SpringSource, G2One and Hyperic by Isaac Arias Posted

Question by Gabriel Kastenbaum Posted

Cloud-Native by chris haddad Posted

intresting ... by bheemesh chinna Posted

now can we finally.. by Yann Cébron Posted

Re: now can we finally.. by Adam FitzGerald Posted

Nice! by Sasa Vender Posted

Too early to sell-out !! by uday garikapati Posted

VMWare takes the virtualization path towards PaaS by mani doraisamy Posted

Re: VMWare takes the virtualization path towards PaaS by Brian Edwards Posted

good match - it looks like symbiotic technologies by Dominique De Vito Posted

WOW!!!! by Floyd Marinescu

Wow, I'm speechless, and very happy for the SpringSource team, they all worked so hard over the years! And this is way more than JBoss sold for but in a far worse economic time. Congrats Rod and team!!!

Re: WOW!!!! by Ric Smtih

Ditto!! Way to go SpringSource!!! Congrats to Rod and the rest. Simple amazing.

Well deserved congrats to SpringSource, G2One and Hyperic by Isaac Arias

Congrats to the SpringSource team! Well deserved. And congrats to the G2One and Hyperic teams as well. Masterfully timed acquisitions indeed!

Question by Gabriel Kastenbaum

I read one or two weeks ago that a "top developper" left a huge compagny (Google, Sun or Microsoft) to join VMWare. Do you see who i am refering to?
It's like something exciting is beginning in this company.

Cloud-Native by chris haddad

SpringSource is going Cloud-native. Travel details can be found on Burton Group's Application Platform Strategies blog.

Re: WOW!!!! by Dave Rooney

Yeah, I can't top "WOW!!!" That about sums it up. Congrats to all!

Re: WOW!!!! by Rajesh k

Congrats to Rod and entire Spring source team. But how is the JEE and spring community going to benefit from this acquisition.

intresting ... by bheemesh chinna

just curious to see, what vmware will do to the java Application space , by acquiring springsource ..

now can we finally.. by Yann Cébron

get Spring 3.0 - it's been promised since months ;-)

Nice! by Sasa Vender

Didn't see that one coming. "WOW!!!" sounds about right :)

Too early to sell-out !! by uday garikapati

It's definitely a too early to sold out from SpringSource !If it have waited some more time... then the price would be nearly a Billion dollers $$$$$$$$$$$$

/Uday

Re: now can we finally.. by Adam FitzGerald

Lost in yesterday's news was the fact that Spring 3.0 Milestone 4 was released for community download.

Release candidates and GA coming soon.

Adam FitzGerald

SpringSource

VMWare takes the virtualization path towards PaaS by mani doraisamy

virtualization approach gives a fairly isolated environment for applications to follow its own architecture. It could follow a fixed (stateless) architecture with its PaaS offering when it comes to patterns such as "Burst Compute". This way most of the JEE applications could be migrated to cloud and will take java developers into the cloud computing mainstream.

manidoraisamy.blogspot.com/2009/08/spring-takes...

Re: VMWare takes the virtualization path towards PaaS by Brian Edwards

I think VMWare got a bargain! It'll be interesting to see which paths Oracle & VmSpring take in the next year especially which businesses they acquire/shed.

good match - it looks like symbiotic technologies by Dominique De Vito

It looks like a good match. VMWare and SpringSource provide Symbiotic technologies.