VMware Acquires SpringSource

In May, SpringSource had itself bought Hyperic, the company behind the monitoring software by the same name. SpringSource and VMware release their software under open source licensing, albeit VMware not always in the most generous spirit. Nonetheless, the acquisition should not change the underlying open source strategy. According to VMWare's announcement, "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."

The purchase will cost VMware about $362 million in cash and $58 million in stocks and options. SpringSource stockholders have already approved and the deal should close in the third quarter of 2009.

Strategically VMware wants to use the acquisition to broaden its presence in cloud computing, where computing resources are pulled from the Web instead of being processed locally. The rather nebulous concept still gets weight in their announcement as one of their goals to "deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures."

For productization, VMware has already chosen a partner in Siemens IT Solutions and Services. According to their joint announcement, the two partners will try to convince their customers of the blessings of cloud computing.

Experts believe that VMware, an EMC affiliate, has come under pressure in the virtualization realm ever since Microsoft released its Hyper-V drivers under General Public License. VMware, which had experienced a revenue explosion in 2008, was beginnning to show a slowdown in Q2 of 2009.