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...