VMware to acquire Engine Yard?

Earlier today GigaOM reported an ongoing acquisition talk between VMware and Engine Yard, the hosting provider that offers a popular Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud for single and multi-tier Ruby-on-Rails applications.

So far Engine Yard raised $37.5M in three rounds of investment. Amazon participated the last two rounds.

After the acquisitions of SpringSource and the one of GemStone Systems, as well as the partnerships with Salesforce and with Google, it’s clear that VMware has a major interest in owning PaaS cloud providers for different development languages, even if the details of its strategy are still very vague at this point.

Almost one year passed since VMware started its expansionistic campaign in the PaaS and SaaS cloud computing markets, and after so much time it’s still extremely hard for customers to understand the new vision of the (former) virtualization vendor.
Hopefully this August, at the VMworld 2010 conference, VMware will finally explain how all the companies it bought so far will contribute to form the big picture of its post-Diane Greene era.