The Holy Grail of IT
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What is closer to the focus of this deal is the process of chasing
what Johnson says he sees as the Holy Grail of IT today. "Getting a
unified platform between public and private clouds is the Holy Grail of
IT for the next year," Johnson said. And the merger with VMware gives
the combined company a "good start in getting there first," he said.
Expanding on that point, Johnson said:
In a conference call with press and analysts, Paul Maritz, president
and CEO of VMware, explained that VMware did not make SpringSource
the "largest M&A transaction" in his company's history
for nothing. Maritz said VMware has been moving beyond the hypervisor
technology to "how one links groups of machines." Indeed, "the role of
the traditional operating system is changing," he said. "There's a new
layer of software generally called virtualization" that has become a
requirement in the enterprise. In addition,
In short, Maritz said the SpringSource acquisition is about "making virtualization more application aware."
Maritz also noted that in the software development arena, frameworks
have emerged as key platforms for developers to write to. "Developers
have voted with their feet and applications are increasingly being
written to these frameworks," Maritz said, noting that the Spring
Framework is a hot property in the Java world, with more than two
million developers having adopted it.
"To go where we need to get in the long run, and to make the
deployment of applications truly autonomic we need to have deeper
instantiation of the application context," and this acquisition enables
that, Maritz said. "This is an essential step if we're going to take
complexity out of the equation."
Maritz explained that VMware came to know SpringSource over the last
nine months or so. The two companies launched an initiative last
December at the SpringSource SpringOne conference where
SpringSource announced a strategic partnership with VMware aimed at
helping enterprises to develop and deploy Spring applications to
virtualized environments.
Johnson said that over the last six months the two companies had
begun to work in earnest on technical integration based on a partnering
roadmap laid out in December, but with no intentions for a merger.
However, Maritz said VMware made an investment of "a couple million" in
the privately held SpringSource in April. Yet, acquisition talks only
"started over the last several weeks," Johnson said.
As for the SpringSource technology and its road map, nothing
changes, Johnson said. That includes Spring, Tomcat, Groovy, Grails and
other technology in the company's portfolio.
"We're largely going to allow SpringSource to do what it has done so well," Maritz said.
"The core technology will remain both open source and portable,"
Johnson said. "People can run Spring on other platforms. And our
commitment to open source will remain the same. The Spring Framework is
very core to SpringSource, but it is driven by the community. In terms
of Spring, I don't think things change at all, except that if we need
resources we're backed by a bigger company. And remember that at the
end of the day I'm just a member of the SpringSource community, too."
"Spring provides a portable programming model that provides a sophisticated abstraction from the deployment platform, and SpringSource servers and management software complete the runtime. VMware provides a sophisticated abstraction from physical hardware. When you put those things together, you end up with the power to underpin either public or private cloud solutions. SpringSource frameworks and tooling will make the choice of those--or of a traditional data center deployment--transparent, and avoid lock-in for the user. Like Spring itself, this will help to reduce costs and empower users."
