VMware announced yesterday that they are to acquire SpringSource, who are a 5 year old company specialising in enterprise and web application development.
On the surface it can be difficult to see where the two organisations will combine to release true value to the end user, but if we look a bit deeper we can start to see some key synergies between the two:
Both Organisations have strived to reduce the complexity typically placed in IT.
VMware's mission (and in fact, the promise of “Cloud Computing”) has been to shift the typical spending of IT Budget (70% maintenance) towards activities that move the business forward or just improve the bottom line. The most recent deliverable on this mission is VMware vSphere 4.
SpringSource has also been a technology innovator with a very similar mission, but focused on the application-centric areas of IT rather than on the hardware-infrastructure focus that VMware is associated with. SpringSource’s obsession has been simplifying and automating the build-run-manage lifecycle that all applications go through, and they have done so by attacking similar pockets of complexity.
VMware has traditionally treated the applications and operating systems running within the virtual machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they were doing, this has started to shift with the advent of vSphere and the vApp capability. It is clear to see that VMware will take SpringSource into the vApp party and start to enhance speed of deployment, application performance guarantees, or provide resiliency in the face of component outages.
The Cloud and PaaS
Lets face it all technology companies are talking about cloud technology and the benefits this will bring to the table, VMware have the following as their vision for cloud technology (public, private and federated):
So with this acquisition we start to see VMware moving into the PaaS (Platform as a Service); Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google’s AppEngine are two of the best known examples of PaaS today, with Microsoft providing Azure for their cloud providers.
PaaS simplifies IT infrastructure and accelerates application development by providing a self-service, self-managing utility for building, deploying, running, and managing applications. Key characteristics of PaaS are:
- Elasticity: automatically scaling up and down the infrastructure to meet the needs of the application
- Multi-tenancy: being able to isolate resources and applications from one another in a shared infrastructure
- Simplified provisioning: Isolate the developer from worrying about how is code gets installed and deployed
- Self-service: allowing developers to gain access to their development infrastructure at any time, in many cases to circumvent the processes and inefficiencies of their typical IT service request processes.
- Rapid development: go from code to cloud in a matter of minutes, particularly during the development and test phases.
So this should be an interesting time with VMware, we have View and SRM about to become fully compliant with vSphere and Lab Manager should prove fundamental to SpringSource.