When VMware’s Rod Johnson talks, people tend to listen.
One person who clearly is listening to Johnson -- general manager of VMware's SpringSource division -- is Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, who commissioned Johnson to acquire WaveMaker and its Spring-based visual development tool that enables “non-expert” programmers to build Web applications quickly and easily. The move marks another in a series of acquisitions VMware (via SpringSource) has made to elbow its way to a place at the table for leading cloud platform providers.
In fact, this move provides VMware even more elbow room, as going after non-coding, less-technical developers will expand the reach of the Spring ecosystem. Maritz and company took a bet on Spring when they acquired SpringSource back in 2009 as a wedge to bust into the Java development world in a big way, as Spring now boasts millions of developers.
Having spent formative years in the software industry at Microsoft, both Maritz and Tod Nielsen, VMware’s co-president in charge of the company’s application platform, know the value of developers to a platform and to a company overall. Nielsen helped devise Microsoft’s blueprint for reaching out to developers and left Microsoft as a vice president of the company’s platform group. At the SpringOne 2GX conference of Spring developers in October 2010 in Chicago, Nielsen told eWEEK he was there primarily to observe and gather intelligence.
“I’m really just here to watch and listen, and to see what developers want and need out of us,” he said. “I’m taking note of how different people are using Spring and the other tools as we continue to put this strategy together. We’re not finished by any means.”
For more, read the eWEEK article: Why VMware's WaveMaker Acquisition Is a Smart Buy.
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Cloud Computing 
