Today VMWare has announced the acquisition of SpringSource, a provider of Web application development and management services. The deal closed at a $420 million valuation, with $362 million in cash and equity plus an assumption of approximately $58 million in unvested stocks and options.
SpringSource is a notable proponent of “lean software,” a concept that is gaining traction in the enterprise space as a means of accelerating the delivery of business applications in the cloud. With the acquisition, VMWare and SpringSource will partner with goals of delivering a platform that allows clients to “more efficiently build, run and manage applications in both internal and external cloud architectures.”
“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.”
The move comes shortly after a small exodus of talent from Google to VMWare. It is also interesting to note that Benchmark Capital is SpringSource’s largest investor, with Peter Fenton sitting on the company’s board of directors. Benchmark is also an investor in FriendFeed, so the firm is clearly enjoying a nice start to the week.
$420M for an IOC framework? Not bad!
We’ve written an equivalent in .Net, just more efficient, to support our code infrastructure, and it costed us a tiny fracture of $420 million.
Obviously, VMWare payed for the talent.
Are you seriously trying to compare that framework you wrote with Spring, which has at least one order of magnitude more features?
Spring already supports .NET
You honestly think they paid that money for an ioc codebase? Classic developer.
+1
Back in the day, I ported a Pilot app over to Atari Basic, but never got the residuals.
A lot of people seem to forget that SpringSource purchased Covalent not that long ago. Wouldn’t be surprised if that has as much to do with the acquisition as the Spring Framework does.
Congrats to Rod Johnson and the rest of SpringSource folk! This is excellent news for Spring community, and a great reward for years of supporting and donating this great framework to the masses.
Just to clarify, from the start, the Spring Framework was much more than just an IoC framework.
Other than that, the Spring portfolio has broadened a lot in the last years, to include things like Spring Integration (for enterprise integration scenarios), Spring Batch (for batch processing) and others.
Also, SpringSource has a lot of committers on various other open source projects such as Eclipse and Tomcat and it is one of the leaders of the up and coming modularity standard called OSGi.
Last but not least, SpringSource has in the past few years also focused on dynamic language (by acquiring G2One, the company sustaining the development of the Groovy language and the Grails web development framework). On top of that, by acquiring Hyperic earlier this year, there’s also a great and open source offering for managing applications.
So yes, I would say SpringSource is about much more than just an IoC framework.
cheers,
Alef Arendsen
p.s. disclosure: I have a vested interest in SpringSource
Spring MVC, JDBC, Remoting, Secuirty, AOP/Advice, Scheduling, Pooling, etc… invaluable and certainly more than just and IoC framework.
Java in the enterprise is quickly becomming a poor investment. Fail.
SpringSource is going Cloud-Native. Travel details can be found on Burton Group’s Application Platform Strategies blog.
In case you are wondering, here’s a lengthy interview of SprinSource CEO Rod Johnson where he discusses the company:
http://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/01/14/springsource-ceo-rod-johnson-part-1/
i love vmware. i use it all the time
Rod Johnson gave a special gift to the Java community back in 03: Spring. I’m glad to see he’s handsomely rewarded for his contributions.
Wait — so they do what exactly?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=springsource
loved it.. :)
Hilarious!
Here are two blog posts that give more context on the reasons behind the deal, one from VMware CTO Steve Herrod: http://bit.ly/uUrU2 and one from SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson http://bit.ly/CtcuI
Very impressive for something that started out as a bunch of example programs to back a book!
I do feel that Spring is the biggest ‘Golden Hammer’ in use in enterprise development at the moment. There are definitely many situations where it is the framework/container of choice, but also I see many companies throwing it at all problems without stopping to think what constitutes the actual technology requirement.
And of the 30+ open-source projects that I have used, I have had to look at the source code of Spring the most – trying to figure out exactly what is happening…
SpringSource developed an excellent framework which they gave to public and developed a very good business model around consulting.
Their business model was better than Sun microsystem which focused mainly on hardware.
VM ware gets an excellent product base and a super team
relatively new to this. Great post Cameron, I linked to your article at http://www.techbanking.blogspot.com which highlights the VMW transaction from a banking perspective.
They still shopping: http://www.virtualizationtimes.com/vmware-acquire-yahoo%E2%80%99s-zimbra-unit
Fred