PaaS with choice: Motivation for VMware to acquire SpringSource

VMware announced to buy SpringSource yesterday. SpringSource had been a technology innovator focused on the application-centric areas rather than on the hardware-infrastructure focus. Their employees were thought leaders in Apache Tomcat, Apache http server, hyperic, Groovy and Grails. 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. They bring this complexity-busting focus to several areas… high-productivity developer tools and frameworks, lightweight application server runtimes, and application management and monitoring. The end goal is very similar; attack the time and money spent on application complexity and maintenance tasks, shifting the focus to new and more reliably deployed applications.

VMware feels SpringSource enables an evolutionary path for application developers to reach end goals without requiring complete infrastructure or application rebuilds.

Ultimately for VMware the end goal is on vCloud which is aimed at IT applications, not infrastructure - there is an extensive application flavor for the cloud to provide these key features. SpringSource would definitely enable VMware in preaching the right solutions to VMware's customers:

1. Elasticity: automatically scaling up and down the infrastructure to meet the needs of the application
2. Multi-tenancy: being able to isolate resources and applications from one another in a shared infrastructure
3. Simplified provisioning: Isolate the developer from worrying about how is code gets installed and deployed
4. 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.
5. Rapid development: go from code to cloud in a matter of minutes, particularly during the development and test phases
6. Simplified (or invisible) management: PaaS offerings typically have built-in application availability and performance management