Rumor: VMware in talks to acquire Engine Yard
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
On August 10, 2009, VMware announced the acquisition of SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management.
On January 12th, 2010, VMware acquired Zimbra, an open-source collaboration software tool, from Yahoo.
On May 6th, 2010, VMware acquired GemStone, to be operated under VMware's SpringSource division."[1]
And now Engine Yard?
I am trying to see a coherent strategy in all these acquisitions. Anyone?
[1] Source: Wikipedia
My guess is what you're seeing is the slow buildout of a platform to provide the enterprise with it's own app store.
Think about it this way: what's a huge risk to VMWare's business? Customers deciding that moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud because the scaling and uptime requirements are too expensive to do in house.
Every company that moves their Exchange mailboxes to Google Apps is a lost VMWare customer.
EDIT doesn't look like LShift is dead. From the press release, they spun off another company for Rabbit, potentially in response to acquisition inquiries, and will just lose a few people it seems.
Some cloud and virtual NAS/SAN companies are happy too. =)
Where's the load balancing acquisition?
I hope it's true and I hope it changes his life. VMWare has a decent track record considering they're a big company.
A VMware acquisition of EY would be interesting for the Ruby world in particular, as VMware would then have the JRuby team, most of the defacto core Rubinius team, and the Maglev team on its payroll. An acquisition of Phusion, Heroku or similar players in Ruby implementations and deployment might then be natural next targets - and with over $2bn in cash, VMware easily has the money to make these deals without breaking a sweat.
Consider the cloud computing business is dominated by Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft and Google, other companies with even more money on the bank need to buy in on a strategic perspective.
Maybe Apple should buy VMware? Or what about HP or Dell?
It's hard to tell and maybe the buyer will split VMWare again into an infrastructure and software/framework part.
For us Ruby developers it's cool if they keep sponsoring the Engine Yard Opensource efforts (JRuby, Rubinius, and so much more) and the professional services.
Personally I thought that Amazon might take over EY and Heroku and put them together into one business. Both are dead without EC2. As Dropbox would be without S3...
Perhaps I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but I just have a feeling in my bones that VMware might be opening the can on a new chapter of not only dominating the virtualization tools market but by getting heavily into commercializing open source technologies too (as Red Hat and Sun did). There's only so much money in selling products, after all. Their acquisition of SpringSource last year also gives this indication.