VMware Acquires Gemstone

VMWare is continuing the expansion of its application infrastructure suite with the purchase of enterprise data management solutions provider GemStone Systems by its Java application development division SpringSource.

The EMC business unit intends to leverage GemStone’s enterprise data management functionality to help users of its infrastructure deploy data management across elastic, highly scalable, geographically distributed architectures located in both public and private cloud computing platforms. 

Evaluating this purchase in tandem with VMWare’s recent purchase of enterprise messaging solutions vendor Rabbit Technologies, it appears that VMWare is squarely focusing on the role data management plays in application deployment to the cloud. Ultimately, VMWare wants to make the right data available to the right applications at the right time within a distributed cloud environment. In particular, VMWare says it plans to improve the caching and data accessibility of its cloud infrastructure with GemStone functionality.

The success of cloud computing depends on the immediate availability of data that, technically speaking, is not really “stored” anywhere. While virtualization offers major advantages in terms of eliminating the time, effort and expense of manual systems installation and maintenance, it also offers the potential for disaster if “virtual” data management cannot produce “real” results. By investing in proven enterprise data management technology, VMWare is taking an important step toward reassuring potential customers that its solutions are just as real as ones that run on black boxes you can see and touch.

SpringSource plans to fully support GemStone’s product line and will continue to support all GemStone customers. GemStone’s flagship product is GemFire Enterprise, a scalable, distributed data platform.