VMWare going to acquire SpringSource for $420 million

Despite being the head of our SpringSource Premier Systems Integrator team at QuinScape this one took me by surprise. It was a well-guarded secret as far as we are concerned and no information leaked previously. And I failed to see the signs although they were there:

• There was a tiny press release at the end of 2008 which went unnoticed and uncommented by most people. I ignored it mostly.
• There was quite a bit of impressive cloud activity at the SpringOne conference earlier this year. I was impressed but I also failed to see the real significance for our business as “the cloud” currently is completely out of customer focus for about 98% of our customers.
• And now there is the press release about the ongoing acquisition.
• And Rod Johnsons blog entry describing his thoughts behind all this.

After a moment of reflection I first of all would like to congratulate Rod, Rob, Jürgen, Eberhard, Sigrid, Mark and all the other hard working SpringSource people we had the pleasure to get acquainted with over the past couple of years. You did a great job and I’m pretty sure you will continue to do a great job. Hats off for managing to grow SpringSource within a meager two years from a decent sized open source company to an infrastructure provider valued almost half a billion dollars. You deserve to reap the rewards and I have to pay all due respect for managing to keep focussed on a single vision. Hats off also for managing to surprise me again and again 😉 The ride so far was very interesting and we at QuinScape look forward to the next steps!

Nonetheless I would like to raise two points that seem important to me (and that I need to get off since I will be leaving for marriage and honeymoon by tomorrow and will get back after the initial dust has settled in the second week of September):

• I believe that it is very important to keep your focus during the next evolutionary step. The team-up with VMWare can be a very strong position if you manage to grow both the software and the infrastructure business you have built up over the past months. IMHO those two components are closely intertwined and both very important sccess factors. Just becoming “the cloud software company” or something like that IMHO will not help to grow your business. But being the “software simplification company” together with being “the maintenance/cloud simplification company” could be a very strong and unique position with a lot of potential for years to come.
• I believe that it is also very important not to lose your culture. I don’t know anything about the internals of VMWare but my guess would be that you now are going to transform from a startup to a corporation unit… and this can be a very painful process if not managed well. Especially if many of the early innovators and drivers (and probably stock holders/co-owners) of SpringSource like Rod Johnson, Rob Harrop, Jürgen Höller, Adrian Colyer, Eberhard Wolff and others now benefit from the financial consequences of the merger (most probably in a very satisfying way) and no longer need to be concerned with the success of SpringSource for their life it will be very important to keep the winning team together and interested in the next steps of SpringSource.

I believe you will succeed in this and we will be happy to continue with SpringSource in the next ventures. I love the IT business – times remain very interesting 🙂