August 10th, 2009
VMware goes shopping: Buys SpringSource for $420 million; Can it keep the open source mojo?
VMware said Monday that it will pay $420 million for privately held SpringSource in a bid to become a bigger player in cloud computing application management and the open source community.
VMware, a virtualization leader that is angling to become a cloud infrastructure OS giant, said that SpringSource will put it at the intersection of virtualization, application frameworks and cloud computing.
In a statement (Techmeme), VMware added that the deal will cost $362 million in cash and equity and the assumption of $58 million in stock options. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.
In a call with analysts today, the company said it was reaffirming its third quarter and fiscal year guidance to reflect the deal. While the company said it expects the deal to have an impact on Q3 non-GAAP operating margins, it remained comfortable with the guidance it announced in its second quarter earnings call.
SpringSource is expected to round out VMware’s platform-as-a-service plans. The companies plan to launch integrated platform as a service bundles with SpringSource software and VMware’s vSphere cloud operating system.
SpringSource, which is five years old, has a vibrant open source developer community and some big-name clients. VMware said it will 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.”
In a blog post, CEO Rod Johnson explained the opportunities as IT transforms itself. He wrote:
The way in which people think about software stacks is changing. Virtualization is reshaping the data center, and cloud computing is set to drive far-reaching changes. Significantly, cloud computing blurs the division between development and operations, bringing new power (and responsibility) to developers… At the SpringOne conference earlier this year we demonstrated just a small part of our vision in this area, with direct deployment of Spring applications from the SpringSource Tool Suite to virtual machines running in a data center under the control of VMware’s Lab Manager product. The audience reaction was enthusiastic. Spring-powered applications have an application blueprint that describes how the various components fit together. With VMware’s vApp concept we can introduce a deployment blueprint that describes how the various machine images, middleware, and management components fit together – and then we can take that blueprint and “make it so” with a single click, in the data center, and in the cloud.
Credit: SpringSource Blog
The purchase of SpringSource definitely puts VMware at the forefront of some key areas. The Spring Framework supports half of all enterprise Java projects. And SpringSource supplies more than 95 percent of the bug fixes for Apache Tomcat, a popular Java application server. And SpringSource also has the Hyperic application monitoring tool.
Now the big question: Will VMware be able to maintain SpringSource’s open source mojo?
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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