VMware scion laps up Enterprise data player

PALO ALTO, US: SpringSource, a division of VMware, Inc. announced that VMware has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone Systems, Inc., a privately held provider of enterprise data management solutions based in Beaverton, Oregon. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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. 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.

“Data management technologies are fundamental to the creation of applications, and with the rise of virtualization and cloud computing, the manner in which applications need to access data is evolving,” said Rod Johnson, general manager of the SpringSource division of VMware. “Cloud computing is a distributed deployment model, and for that reason, caching and data accessibility are of far greater strategic importance than before. We are acquiring and will integrate into the SpringSource portfolio a well-regarded set of high-performing data management solutions with GemStone.”

Today’s news, combined with the recent acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, Ltd. and the recent hiring of Salvatore Sanfilippo, the lead programmer for the open source Redis project, underscores VMware and SpringSource’s understanding of the critical role data management plays in application deployment to the cloud. This acquisition will further SpringSource’s strategy to deliver the application infrastructure required for modern cloud applications, adds a press note.

“Modern, cloud-centric applications will be powered by a lightweight application platform, scalable data platform and virtualized infrastructure as a service, and SpringSource is building out a portfolio to address all of those requirements,” said John Barr, Distinguished Analyst at The 451 Group. “SpringSource clearly recognizes the fundamental emerging application infrastructure requirements, and therefore its customers are prepared for the data center of today and tomorrow.”

SpringSource plans to fully support GemStone’s product line and will continue to support all GemStone customers. GemStone’s flagship product is GemFire Enterprise, a scalable, distributed data platform that puts data where it is needed across a network to remove latency. Other GemStone products include GemFire SQLFabric, a memory-oriented SQL data management platform and GemStone/S, a platform for running distributed Smalltalk applications.

“Our vision for the future of data aligns completely with SpringSource and VMware, in that we believe modern applications are distributed and require data to be available in the fabric of the infrastructure,” said Richard Lamb, president of GemStone. “There are distributed applications–think VoIP and disaster recovery–and there are distributed deployment environments–think SpringSource’s tc Server on VMware–and now SpringSource is forging ahead with the infrastructure needed for distributed data.”