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Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

"VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, a company with core expertise in 3D graphics driver development on November 26, 2008.

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

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Excluding the graphics company, it sounds like they're trying to build out an application suite that makes it easy to keep firing up new vmware nodes as you grow.

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.

Don't forget a minor, but relevant, acquisition (Redis).

And RabbitMQ.

Woah. I missed that one. I thought RabbitMQ was written by the LShift guys, which based on the fact that the LShift website has a big banner saying "SpringSource acquires Rabbit Technologies" is accurate, but is LShift dead, in favor of the obviously spun off Rabbit Technologies? Or is LShift going to continue to be around, but with a few less people. This has probably been discussed before--will search.

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.

No, indeed I can confirm that LShift is very much alive and shifting into new ventures. Some of the guys moved over to Spring/VMW but the rest of us are still here on the corner of Hoxton Square, but we are recruiting like crazy right now...so if you happen to know anyone who fits the profile, please point them our way... Mike

http://www.thebiggertruth.com/2010/06/and-the-battles-yet-be... has a pretty good take - on VMWare vs Oracle and "Level 2 big iron"

Definitely creating a virtual app product that will take over the market share of HP, Sun, Dell, IBM, etc. Someone was predicting the cloud network will be a trillion dollar market so they are positioning themselves for it.

Some cloud and virtual NAS/SAN companies are happy too. =)

It's a do-it-yourself PaaS strategy.

Where's the load balancing acquisition?

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