VMware's SpringSource buys GemStone

SAN JOSE, USA: Virtualization software major VMware's open source Java division SpringSource has agreed to buy enterprise database-caching software firm GemStone Systems.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SpringSource will acquire both the technology and people behind GemStone, the company said, according to media reports.

With this purchase, VMware will be able to address issue of scaling databases in cloud computing, IDG News Service reported.

"GemStone solves a really important problem. If you are building applications that need to scale out in the enterprise or move to the cloud, you need to scale your applications without major architectural changes. GemStone's technology has a proven capability of doing that," the report quoted Rod Johnson, general manager of the SpringSource as saying.

GemStone's flagship software is its GemFire Enterprise, an in-memory caching database for distributed platforms.

GemFire Enterprise (GFE) is a high-performance, distributed data management platform that serves as the core component of the GemFire Enterprise Data Fabric.

GFE supports multiple layouts and topologies, allowing it to be easily incorporated into various architectures such as J2EE, .NET, Grid, SOA and web portals and provide extremely high performance, throughput, and scalability.

"Basically what GemFire does is load live data into this middleware , and Java applications interact with it in real time, as if it were a real data store. At the end of the day, that data is typically put back into a relational store or some sort of asynchronous end-of-day record," said Richard Lamb, president of GemStone.

SpringSource has pledged to continue to support GemStone's current customer base, as well as the company's other products, such as its software for running distributed Smalltalk applications, GemStone/S, said IDG report.