Recent VM Acquisitions

VMware has made several other acquisitions in 2010:

» Zimbra, a hosted e-mail service, acquired from Yahoo. The New York Times called it “the icing on the PaaS.”

» Parts of EMC’s Ionix IT management business, including solutions aimed at delivering improved management and deployment of servers and applications in a virtualized data center. This deal gives VMware some tools to measure and automate the provisioning and management of virtualized machines. Since a platform can have hundreds of thousands of VMs, automation is essential. VMware is acquiring from EMC, its parent, all technology and intellectual property of FastScale, Application Discovery Manager, Server Configuration Manager, and Service Manager and will maintain engineering, marketing, sales, and support operations in the United States, Europe, Israel, India, and Australia. (As part of the agreement, EMC will retain the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights to continue to offer customers the products acquired by VMware.) VMware says that this “new capability will provide a holistic view of configuration compliance of complete IT services from underlying physical assets to applications. VMware plans to further optimize the acquired products for dynamic, VMware vSphere-based cloud infrastructure, to deliver unparalleled visibility, control and simplicity of enterprise IT management.”

» Rabbit MQ, an open-source messaging protocol acquired by VMware’s SpringSource subsidiary. This acquisition “enables VMware to provide a messaging platform that is flexible enough to live on company servers, a platform or a private or public cloud computing environments” according to The New York Times. RabbitMQ is a successful and well-regarded technology that forms the backbone for many cloud messaging systems environments, providing a multi-protocol, completely open, portable messaging system. The code was created by Open Source vendors Cohesive FT16 and LShift based on the relatively young AMQP open standard for messaging middleware, an industry effort backed by major banks, Cisco, and a handful of smaller companies. As hardware is virtualized, translating some of the network equipment like load balancers into software allows services running on the virtualized hardware to better scale.

» Gemstone, which “provides a distributed data caching technology to help analyze and crunch data across a number of servers or in the cloud——something VMware can use to make sure its PaaS can handle data without bogging down” according to The New York Times.

» EngineYard? Maybe. As we go to press, EngineYard was also in talks to be acquired by VMware. EngineYard already works closely with VMware, because VMware provides its underlying software and is a strategic investor in Terremark, which hosts EngineYard’s enterprise-class PaaS.

Source of Information : Implementing and Developing Cloud Computing Applications 2011

Recent VM Acquisitions