VMware fleshes out its cloud computing support model with SpringSource grab

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum. His profile is here. You can reach him here.

VMware’s proposed $362 million acquisition of SpringSource is all about getting serious in competing with Salesforce.com and Google App Engine as the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud with the technology that everybody already uses.

This acquisition was a means to an end, pairing two companies that could not be less alike. VMware is a household name, sells software through traditional commercial licenses, and markets to IT operations. SpringSource is a grassroots, open source developer-oriented firm whose business is a cottage industry by comparison. The cloud brought both companies together that each faced complementary limitations on their growth. VMware needed to grow out beyond its hardware virtualization niche if it was to regain its groove, while SpringSource needed to grow up and find deeper pockets to become anything more than a popular niche player.

The fact is that providing a virtualization engine, even if you pad it with management utilities that act like an operating system, is still a raw cloud with little pull unless you go higher up in the stack. Raw clouds have their appeal only to vendors that resell capacity or enterprise large firms with the deep benches of infrastructure expertise to run their own virtual environments. For the rest of us, we need a player that provides a deployment environment, handles the plumbing, that is married to a development environment. That is what Salesforce’s Force.com and Google’s App Engine are all about. VMware’s gambit is in a way very similar to Microsoft’s Software + Services strategy: use the software and platforms that you are already used to, rather than some new

The most glaring omission is need for Java object distributed caching to provide yet another alternative to scalability.

environment in a cloud setting. There’s nothing less familiar to large IT environments than VMware’s ESX virtualization engine, and in the Java community, there’s nothing more familiar than the Spring framework which – according to the company – accounts for roughly half of all Java installations.

With roughly $60 million in stock options for SpringSource’s 150-person staff, VMware is intent on keeping the people as it knows nothing about the Java virtualization business. Normally, we’d question a deal like this because the company’s are so dissimilar. But the fact that they are complementary pieces to a PaaS offering gives the combination stickiness.

For instance, VMware’s vSphere’s cloud management environment (in a fit of bravado, VMware calls it a cloud OS) can understand resource consumption of VM containers; with SpringSource, it gets to peer inside the black box and understand why those containers are hogging resource. That provides more flexibility and smarts for optimizing virtualization strategies, and can help cloud customers answer the question: do we need to spin out more VMs, perform some load balancing, or re-apportion all those Spring TC (Tomcat) servlet containers?

The addition of SpringSource also complements VMware’s cloud portfolio in other ways. In his blog about the deal, SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson noted that the idea of pairing VMware’s Lab Manager (that’s the test lab automation piece that VMware picked up through the Akimbi acquisition) proved highly popular with Spring framework customers. In actuality, if you extend Lab manager from simply spinning out images of testbeds to spinning out runtime containers, you would have VMware’s answer to IBM’s recently-introduced WebSphere Cloudburst appliance.

VMware isn’t finished however. The most glaring omission is need for Java object distributed caching to provide yet another alternative to scalability. If you only rely on spinning out more VMs, you get a highly rigid one-dimensional cloud that will not provide the economies of scale and flexibility that clouds are supposed to provide. So we wouldn’t be surprised if GigaSpaces or Terracotta might be next in VMware’s acquisition plans.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog . Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum. His profile is here. You can reach him here.