VMware has pushed further into the Cloud platform market with its announcement of a $362 million purchase of privately held SpringSource. While the ink dries on that, SpringSource is carrying on with its own business with the launch of its Cloud Foundry.
Through its Spring Framework Java development model, SpringSource is the company behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes and management tools. SpringSource and its lean software framework will become part of VMware's Cloud infrastructure strategy.
"VMware has led the modernisation of datacentre infrastructures through innovative virtualisation and cloud architectures, providing customers with cost savings, agility and choice,” said Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource. "The SpringSource team and community are committed to revolutionising the way companies build, run and manage applications. By combining forces, I'm confident that we'll be able to deliver a set of truly remarkable solutions that dramatically simplify enterprise IT."
According to VMware, the plan is to merge these technologies into an integrated Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that can be hosted at customer data centres or at Cloud service providers. "Today's modern computing environments are moving to an application and data-centric world powered by state of the art virtualised and cloud computing platforms,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of Vmware. "The combination of SpringSource and VMware capitalises on this shift and places us right at the intersection of the most important forces in the software market today – virtualisation, modern application frameworks and Cloud Computing."
Meanwhile SpingSource continues about its own business with the launch of SpringSource Cloud Foundry which enables applications to be deployed from Cloud Foundry to the Amazon EC2 cloud. "Cloud Foundry is an enterprise Java Cloud where developers can create an account, sign in, and directly deploy Spring, Grails, or other Java applications directly within a public cloud," said Johnson. "This gives SMEs a self-service model where they can write an application and deploy it truly within minutes.”
Multiple Clouds
Cloud Foundry leverages Hyperic management technology acquired by SpringSource. Cloud Foundry is expected to be extended to the VMware vCloud cloud platform and possibly the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform.
“Essentially, [this] would be the Java equivalent of Microsoft's budding Azure cloud for .NET,” said Tony Baer of research house Ovum. “SpringSource is aiming to provide the Java counterpart of Microsoft's Software + Services strategy. Like Microsoft's .NET platform, SpringSource's core technologies are already practically household names. The company claims that the Spring framework, around which SpringSource was founded, now shows up in at least half of all Java installations. Even if that claim was exaggerated (it's a tough one to verify) the fact that major Java platform providers such as Oracle and IBM also support the Spring framework is a big indicator of its popularity.
“Cloud Foundry differs from PaaS offerings from providers such as Salesforce or Zoho in that it is based on technologies that are already widely used by developers on premises. It differs from Google in that it relies on widely used technologies as opposed to Google's language of choice, the specialized Python. What's striking is that SpringSource's message closely resembles Microsoft's Software + Services positioning, in that the technologies can be used in Cloud Foundry or on premises.”
Baer sees the VMtakeover as a key part of turning Cloud Foundry into a commercial products. “Simply making SpringSource a part of a “real” company like VMware won't be enough for it to monetize its open source technology. Putting all the pieces together in an optimised bundle is crucial for enterprises to perceive real value add and open their chequebooks,” said Baer. “SpringSource needs additional virtualization at the Java object (or JVM) level to provide richer options for using the right scaling approaches for the application. That is where the potential synergy with VMware gets interesting. It's not simply that VMware provides the de facto replacement for whatever Linux flavour or other OS platform Cloud Foundry runs on; instead it is the possibility of leveraging VMware's vSphere cloud environment to provide real enterprise scale.”
Post new Comment