VMware to Acquire SpringSource, Expanding its Cloud Strategy

VMware agreed to acquire SpringSource, a start-up offering enterprise and web application development and management software, for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options.


SpringSource, which has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, offers a an enterprise Java programming model.
This Spring Framework provides a lightweight programming environment that makes applications portable across open source and commercial application server environments from IBM, Oracle and others. Apache Tomcat is the world's most widely used Java application server, deployed at more than 60% of all organizations running Java server applications. SpringSource is the key contributor to and maintainer of Tomcat and is responsible for more than 95% of the bug fixes over the past two years. SpringSource also leads Groovy and Grails, a rapidly growing dynamic language and Web application framework, each with more than 70,000 downloads per month. Together, Groovy and Grails deliver the rapid application productivity of Ruby on Rails for web applications, while maintaining skill-set and infrastructure compatibility with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) environments.


VMware said the deal was driven by its goal of delivering new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures. 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.


"Today's modern computing environments are moving to an application and data-centric world powered by state of the art virtualized and cloud computing platforms," said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware. "The combination of SpringSource and VMware capitalizes on this shift and places us right at the intersection of the most important forces in the software market today -- virtualization, modern application frameworks and cloud computing."http://www.vmware.com
http://www.springsource.com