One of my pals (DANIEL EASON) on twitter (that popular refuge for twits everywhere!) drew my attention to rather humourous tidbit of info. But before I share that with you, let me get you up to speed. VMware are to aquire a company called SpringSource. According to this bit of text which I shamelessly lifted from Steve Herrods blogpost, SpringSource began as:

“….the commercial development team leading the innovative Spring portfolio of open source projects, an effort focused on providing a simpler, lighter-weight alternative to the Java EE (J2EE) standard. Led by Rod Johnson (author, enterprise java authority, and SpringSource CEO), Spring has become the de facto standard programming model for modern enterprise Java, rich web, and enterprise integration applications. Over the last couple of years, SpringSource has expanded their purview across an even broader range of offerings, employing the thought leaders within the Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server, Hyperic, Groovy and Grails open source communities.”

[Ed. Groovy? Who calls a IT product "Groovy". Ah, that would be web-developers for you..]

This acquistion froms a long line of other acquistions in the past from VMware, and the idea is for VMware to be able to offer the SpringSource environment as part of the VMware’s vApp/Cloud vision of the future. vApps which are available to vSphere4 customers, allow you to download entire suites of multi-tier applications and then power them on – in a shrinked wrapped way.

Anyway, down to what this blog post is actually about. Remember my pal on twitter? Well, he sent me this link from ComputerWorld.

Spring may be coming soon for Microsoft’s Azure

Go ahead and read it if you like. But I will summarise it here if you really can’t be arsed. It was written by Paul Krill on the 24.07.2009. So its not very old. In the article CEO of SpringSource (Rod Johnson) outlines how enthuiastic they are about partnering with Microsoft specifically cloud iniative called “Azure” (Ed. Geddit?Azure?, blue, blue skies, clouds float in blue skies…). To quote Rod/the article:

“We’re absolutely open to working with them… Personally, I’m interested in talking with them about Azure and the Spring Java story for Azure… I think Spring developers should definitely be able to interoperate with Microsoft technologies, and I think there’s a bunch of stuff that they’re doing in Azure that may be of interest to our community… Right now, there’s essentially no business relationship that we have [with Microsoft]. We’re talking…”

Relationship? Talking? Er, perhaps not now….

What are we to make of this? Has VMware scored a fantasic goal against M$, affectively kicking the ball between the open-legs of the goalkeeper of Microsoft? OR… does it say more about media savy world where every week there’s some lamed assed story of how companyB intend to buy/merge/partner with companyA. A world were CEOs of CompanyB make upbeat comments about “talking” with companyA only to wind-up working with CompanyC. I dare say that the CEO of SpringSource knew what he was saying was disingenious to say the least, but in the corporate culture he’d be strung up by the board by speculating about an acquisition that was under construction. Still its only weeks ago since the ComputerWorld. Perhaps VMware say this and thought, crickey we should buy “SpringSource” ASAP otherwise we will be left behind by Microsoft [I think not!]. This acquistion has probably been in the pipeline sometime before the ComputerWorld article.

Moral of the story. Don’t always believe what you read on the internet. Anyway, that means I need to disappear right now in a puff of my own logic…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 9:20 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.