VMware seems to want the goodies SpringSource snatched up when it bought Hyperic. Rod Johnson and company purchased Hyperic in May, a move which puzzled me a bit at the time. Now that VMware is paying US$362 million for SpringSource, a company built originally to support the Spring framework for Java, I think we all know why Hyperic was valuable.
Hyperic did really cool monitoring and management. They're in the IT management and operations side, not the software development side (unless you count metric gathering systems as part of the optimization process). The Hyperic products were causing quite a stir when I talked to systems admins and to companies like Red Hat; I kept hearing about them from people, starting early last year. SpringSource couched the acquisition as a move to unify the lifecycle: give developers more work room in production to monitor issues, and track them back to the code.
But the real reason for that acquisition, I now believe, was to increase the overall value of SpringSource as an acquisition target. You must admit, this was a nice exit value for a company less than six years old. And the one thing VMware seems to be lacking is a truly excellent set of management tools.
The end result is that VMware has just paid a lot of money for some really nice systems monitoring and managing tools. And it also gets Rod Johnson, too, and all the other cool software development and training resources SpringSource offered. Let's hope they don't get gutted: SpringSource has produced some nifty development time savers, like roo.
VMware really wants Rod Johnson and his team, too. They laid out $60 million in stock just for employee compensation on SpringSource's side.