VMware's vision: Clouds everywhere
While I was making my way out to San Francisco for OpenSource World/Next Generation Datacenter/Cloudworld, VMware issued a press release stating that they were acquiring Spring Source, a supplier of Platform as a Service offerings. This, I believe, opens the door for VMware to offer a nearly complete, end-to-end solution for those wanting a Cloud Computing offering. The only big pieces missing are the datacenters themselves and the final mile from the network to the customer.
Here's what VMware has to say about the move.
VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.
SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools. In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.
Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers. These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future. Forrester Research expects the emerging and rapidly growing PaaS market to expand to $15B by 2016. (Platform-As-A-Service Market Sizing, July 13, 2009).
...
SpringSource is at the forefront of “lean software,” a concept that is being rapidly adopted by enterprises focused on dramatically cutting cost and complexity, increasing productivity, and accelerating the delivery of high-quality, business-critical applications. SpringSource’s offerings and their underlying open-source technologies are uniquely able to address a wide range of corporate, web and commercial applications through a dynamic, yet consistent architecture. SpringSource counts a majority of the Global 2000 as current customers, and has a rapidly growing business delivering support, training and commercial software based on the well-known open source technologies and communities led by SpringSource:
- The Spring Framework is the leading enterprise Java programming model; currently supporting half of all enterprise Java projects and used by approximately two million developers worldwide. The Spring Framework provides a high productivity, lightweight programming environment that makes applications portable across open source and commercial application server environments from IBM, Oracle and others.
- Apache Tomcat is the world’s most widely used Java application server, deployed at more than 60% of all organizations running Java server applications. SpringSource is the key contributor to and maintainer of Tomcat and is responsible for more than 95% of the bug fixes over the past two years.
- SpringSource leads Groovy and Grails, a rapidly growing dynamic language and Web application framework, each with more than 70,000 downloads per month. Together, Groovy and Grails deliver the rapid application productivity of Ruby on Rails for web applications, while maintaining skill-set and infrastructure compatibility with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) environments.
- With more than 3,500 deployments worldwide, SpringSource’s Hyperic application monitoring and management tools are recognized as among the leading open source offerings in the space. In March, SpringSource/Hyperic was named one of Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing Management and Professional Services.”
Snapshot analysis
Before I tell you my analysis of this move by VMware, I have to tell you another story. So, my friends, sit back with your coffee/tea/soft drink and I'll ask Mr. Peabody to engage the Wayback Machine.Some background
In the 1960s and 1970s, suppliers of information technology (called data processing then) often provided complete computing environments. They made the computers and also developed the operating systems, development tools, data management tools, networking tools and storage. While this had some clear benefits, one was assured that everything would work together, it also locked organiations into the products of a single supplier. Interoperability among vendor's products was challenging to say the least.In the 1980s and into the 1990s, organizations voiced strong requirements to "open up" those solutions and demanded open solutions so products from different suppliers could be pressed into service together to address their needs more effectively.
While moving to open software and open APIs allowed organizations to move in the direction they wanted, it also lead to a "decomposition" of the industry into different layers. Many suppliers emerged at every level. Some levels were fragmented to such an extent that it was hard to achieve what was desired, that is, the ability to put together optimal solutions to the problems at hand today and pave a smooth road to facing future requirements
Today's world
Large suppliers, hoping to maximize both their revenues and margins while minimizing costs have started trying to re-aggregate all of the tools and services necessary to provide complete solutions.Some, such as Oracle have started the process to become hardware suppliers as well as offering complete stacks of software to provide the whole computing environment by acquiring a number of companies. Microsoft has chosen to develop a quilt made up of system software, development tools, data management tools and applications to support just about everything from handheld devices, set top boxes, desktop and laptop systems and servers from deskside to the datacenter. HP and IBM also have opened up their checkbooks and have bought entry into many markets.
It is clear that all of these suppliers believe that people simply don't have the time to evaluate a whole catalog of offerings and put selected tools together to create solutions in a cost effective, time effective fashion. Organizations facing finanical and market pressures have clearly decided to "cut costs at any cost" even if it means locking themselves into a single vendor's offerings once again.
A different vision
VMware sees the same trending info, but has a different vision, a vision of clouds everywhere. The organization sees that it has the products to create virtual environments that can live happily on the desktop, mobile device or on servers that range from desktop to deskside to local datacenter to datacenters on the other side of the planet. This vision required that VMware have tools to manage complete industry standard datacenters.The move to acquire Spring Source is evidence that VMware believes that it can offer complete, integrated solutions in all of those areas without having their own operating systems, data management tools, networking or storage solutions. Since those have largely become commodities, why bother?
Although Spring Source is known as a supplier of the tools to create and manage Platform as a Service offerings, the company hasn't chosen to build out its own datacenters.
VMware sees a future of PaaS and Cloud Computing as a whole that is bright enough that it was willing to pay $420 million for Spring Source. This is an amazing sum when one considers Spring Source's current projected revenues and the fact that the 451 Group projects that revenues for the entire Cloud Computing market are going to be in that same ballpark in 2009. Let's see if this was a wise decision.