Most of VMware’s VMworld announcements showed tremendous customer support for their new vSphere product line. For example, Todd Nielson, VMware Chief Operating Officer (formerly CEO of Borland and a former Microsoft vice president) stated VMware products were in use in 96% of the Fortune 1000 companies. In addition, the new vSphere release is downloaded 20-30,000 times per week.
Clearly, VMware’s moves have been well received by business worldwide. Even so, I had to wonder how the announcement of the acquisition of Spring Source helps VMware. Spring Source is essentially a Java application development platform and I for one just don’t see the connection to virtualization or enterprise management. While it is clear that at the end of the day virtualization is about better supporting the applications that an organization runs it also seems that this move is outside of VMware’s core competency. I couldn’t help but think its main thrust may be just to annoy Microsoft.