This seems like a strange acquisition. VMWare makes money from selling virtualization and VM management software; spring is just a set of popular java frameworks. maybe they're trying to enter a completely different market?
SpringSource makes money from selling support for Spring Framework and related tools, lately they've been promoting their own app server (built on top of Tomcat with extra monitoring stuff built in) and IDE; so they are more than just a popular framework.
But this is a very interesting acquisition. I don't think many people would have ever dreamt of this team-up.
Spring is ramping into the cloud I read. In my opinion VMWare produces great products and are in a huge growth market. This will pull a lot of java folks into the cloud that haven't gotten around to it yet. Still, I agree, seems like a strange acquisition.
I haven't used it much in a couple year, but I would not consider Spring lean software in the least, as stated. Standard package comes with quite a bit, but even at it's leanest IoC I'd consider Google Guice leaner (and prettier imo). Certainly better than the old EJB specs though.
It's basically a move into cloud service offerings, so that they can move up the vertical chain - build, run and manage.
I thought it was a little strange at first, but it's quite exciting if they can bring simple hosting and scaling to Java apps, in the same way Spring has made enterprise development easy with Java.
When all is said and done, this might be a pretty interesting story about how to start a company - and make money running it - based on an open source model.
VMWare might just want the Hyperic monitoring software which SpringSource bought a while back. Plus, they get some skilled developers in the deal so it might just be a Hyperic-and-talent acquisition.
What troubles me is why VMWare would pay such a high valuation for a company whose software is highly dependent on Java infrastructure from one of their competitors, Oracle.
I do see VMWare wanting to put together a more robust cloud offering with an AppEngine type infrastructure, but I think they would be more credible just hosting VMWare machines. That would be a great cloud to have- more like an easier EC2 with local storage than a constrained environment like AppEngine.
