Bolstering its "cloud" offering

May 7, 2010 13:09 GMT  ·  By

VMware is continuing its move beyond virtualization and into cloud computing and the enterprise services market. It has now acquired GemStone, through SpringSource, a company specializing in data-management solutions for enterprises. No financial details were disclosed, but the acquisition follows the path of similar moves that VMWare has engaged in recently.

“The acquisition will advance SpringSource and VMware's vision of providing the infrastructure necessary for emerging cloud-centric applications, with built-in availability, scalability, security and performance guarantees,” the company stated.

“These modern applications require new approaches to data management, given they will be deployed across elastic, highly scalable, geographically distributed architectures. With the addition of GemStone's data-management solutions, customers will be able to make the right data available to the right applications at the right time within a distributed cloud environment,” it added.

GemStone specializes in large-scale data management, in-memory caching and other technologies that are right at home in the ‘cloud.’ It has 200 customers in the financial services, telecommunications and other fields. The US government is also one of its customers.

The technology GemStone brings to the mix will be integrated with SpringSource’s Java-based cloud platform, acting as middleware between it and the VMware platform running underneath. SpringSource says GemStone’s existing products will continue to be supported, as will all of its customers.

VMware has been buying a number of companies lately, trying to strengthen its emerging cloud platform. It has recently acquired Rabbit Technologies, maker of the RabbitMQ messaging system. A couple of months back, it acquired the enterprise email suite maker Zimbra from Yahoo planning to offer it as a service running on its expanding family of products.

SpringSource was only acquired last summer, marking the first decisive step in VMware’s new direction. With the Java framework that SpringSource brought, VMware hopes to tackle traditional big players in the enterprise market, but without competing with them directly, rather opting to place all of its bets on cloud technology.