Spring (company)

Computer software company

This article is about the computer software company. For the e-commerce company, see Spring, Inc. For the media company with the same name, see FremantleMedia Australia.

Spring

Company type| Subsidiary
Industry| Computer software
Founder| Rod Johnson
Headquarters| Palo Alto, California, USA
Parent| VMware
Website| spring.io

Spring (previously known as SpringSource) was a software company founded by Rod Johnson, who also created the Spring Framework, an open-source application framework for enterprise Java applications. VMware purchased Spring for $420 million in August 2009.[1]

## History

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Originally incorporated by Rod Johnson in 2004 as Interface21, the company was renamed SpringSource in 2007 to better reflect its association with the Spring Framework.[2] Over time, most Spring developers were employed full-time. Spring is open source. The company was eventually renamed Spring.[when?]

Spring acquired Covalent Technologies on January 29, 2008, which was then one of the leading contributors to Apache Tomcat.[3][4]

Several other acquisitions then followed:

* G2One, the company behind Apache Groovy and Grails, acquired in November 2008[5]
* Hyperic, which developed a tool for monitoring Java applications and their environment, acquired in May 2009[6]
* Cloud Foundry, a Platform as a Service provider, acquired in August 2009[7]

Using these acquisitions, the company's business expanded beyond support for its application frameworks, Spring and Grails. It went on to offer a suite of software products across all three stages of the enterprise Java application life cycle: build (develop), run (deploy), and manage. SpringSource created two commercial server products specifically aimed at Spring developers: TC Server, a commercial version of Tomcat integrated with Hyperic for deployment and management, and DM Server, an OSGi based server which never was commercially viable.[citation needed] After spending millions on development with no result, it was subsequently donated to the Eclipse Foundation as the Virgo project. Both servers came with a number of customer support options.

## Acquisition by VMware

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In August 2009, SpringSource was purchased for $420 million by VMware,[1] where it was maintained for some time as a separate division within VMware. The commercial products were rebadged as the vFabric Application Suite. Acquisitions continued including RabbitMQ (an open-source AMQP message broker), Redis (an open source, noSQL key-value store) and Gemstone (developer of several data-management products). These products (except Redis) also became part of the vFabric product set.

In April 2013, VMware, along with its parent company EMC Corporation, formally created a joint venture (with GE) called Pivotal Software. All of VMware's application-oriented products, including Spring, were transferred to this organization.[8][9] VMware reacquired Pivotal in 2019 [10] and folded it into the Tanzu application suite.[10]

VMware sold the Gemstone object database products to GemTalk Systems in May 2013.[11] Pivotal ended their sponsorship of Groovy/Grails in March 2015.[12]

## References

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1. ^ a b "VMWare Acquires SpringSource". TechCrunch. AOL. August 11, 2009. Retrieved July 23, 2023.
2. ^ Taft, Darryl K. (2007-11-20). "Interface21 Is Now SpringSource". eWEEK. Retrieved 2023-07-23.
3. ^ Johnson, Rod (January 29, 2008). "Some Decisions are Easy". SpringSource Blog. Archived from the original on 2013-07-13. Retrieved 2013-07-12.
4. ^ "SpringSource pounces on Covalent". The Register. 2008-01-29.
5. ^ "SpringSource Acquires Groovy and Grails company (G2One)". IndicThreads. 2008-11-12. Retrieved 2023-07-23.
6. ^ "Hyperic acquisition binds Spring Framework to cloud". The Register. 2009-05-04.
7. ^ Taft, Darryl K. (2009-08-19). "SpringSource Acquires Cloud Foundry, Launches New Cloud Platform". eWEEK. Retrieved 2023-07-23.
8. ^ "GE Joins EMC and VMware in a Joint Venture to Challenge Software Megavendors in the Cloud". Press Release. April 24, 2013. Archived from the original on April 28, 2013. Retrieved August 31, 2016.
9. ^ Quentin Hardy (April 24, 2013). "Pivotal's Audacious Plan". New York Times Bits. Retrieved August 31, 2016.
10. ^ a b "VMware Completes Acquisition of Pivotal". Press Release.
11. ^ GemTalk Systems (May 2, 2013). "GemTalk Systems Acquires GemStone/S Products from VMware". PRWeb. Archived from the original on August 10, 2014. Retrieved August 5, 2014.
12. ^ "Groovy 2.4 And Grails 3.0 To Be Last Major Releases Under Pivotal Sponsorship". 19 Jan 2015.

## External links

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* Official website