VMware went shopping and came home with Springsource

As a member of the virtualization startup ecosystem, it was good to see one of our own (Springsource) get picked up by VMware for a cool $400MM+ this week.  The private market and public market (really any market) are terrible right now so it is encouraging to see one of the tech industry leaders make a strategic acquisition and pay some big dollars.  As an ex-VC I should also point out that if you assume the VCs owned about half of the company (which had raised about $35MM), this is a nice return (5X money or better, with the first money in coming out in ~5 years) considering the macroeconomic conditions.

Honestly, I can’t say Springsource was on my radar as one of VMware’s M&A targets, but it makes sense if you believe VMware wants to offer a complete datacenter OS that spans the application down through the operating system and hypervisor.  It will take VMware a while to integrate the technology, but I think a really compelling PaaS offering will come out the other end.  Watching the competitive response from MSFT (Azure) will be interesting, too.

Really glad to be playing in the space with my new company, things are moving fast and I think they will be for the next several years in cloud/virtualization.

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