A few hours ago SD Times published an interesting article revealing that SpringSource, the subsidiary that VMware acquired in August 2009 to lead its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing strategy, is about to acquire GemStone Systems.
The article has been removed just a few minutes after the publication but it was too late. The Google News bot has been quicker and redistributed the first few lines of the piece:
Rod Johnson, general manager of VMware’s SpringSource division, said that the GemStone acquisition is intended to round out the VMware Java middleware …
The way the sentence is wrote clarifies that this is not a rumor. Probably SD Times removed it just because the news was mistakenly published before the VMware’s embargo expired.
GemStone Systems (formerly Servio Logic) originally developed a proprietary application framework for Smalltalk. The company now offers the GemFire platform, marketed as an enterprise data fabric.
GemFire is a fault-tolerant, distributed system that pools memory, CPU, network and optionally storage, to store and manage application objects and behavior. Something otherwise called distributed object cache.
GemFire can be plugged into any Java virtual machine and is especially useful to achieve better database performance in financial applications.
The biggest competitors of GemStone Systems are Oracle (thanks to the acquisition of Tangasol in March 2007), GigaSpaces and Microsoft (with Velocity).
SpringSource already acquired other three companies: Hyperic (this was well before the VMware acquisition but virtualization.info got rumors that VMware specifically required and funded that deal), CloudFoundry and Rabbit Technologies, just three weeks ago.
Update: The Register and other publications confirm the acquisition.
Additionally, it’s worth to highlight that VMware hired the creator and lead developer of Redis, a high-performance database that completely resides in RAM.