

Rumor: VMware in talks to acquire Engine Yard - petercooper
http://gigaom.com/2010/06/10/vmware-in-talks-to-acquire-engineyard/

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plinkplonk
"VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, a company with core expertise in 3D
graphics driver development on November 26, 2008.

On August 10, 2009, VMware announced the acquisition of SpringSource, a leader
in enterprise and web application development and management.

On January 12th, 2010, VMware acquired Zimbra, an open-source collaboration
software tool, from Yahoo.

On May 6th, 2010, VMware acquired GemStone, to be operated under VMware's
SpringSource division."[1]

And now Engine Yard?

I am trying to see a coherent strategy in all these acquisitions. Anyone?

[1] Source: Wikipedia

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acangiano
Don't forget a minor, but relevant, acquisition (Redis).

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lapusta
And RabbitMQ.

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apgwoz
Woah. I missed that one. I thought RabbitMQ was written by the LShift guys,
which based on the fact that the LShift website has a big banner saying
"SpringSource acquires Rabbit Technologies" is accurate, but is LShift dead,
in favor of the obviously spun off Rabbit Technologies? Or is LShift going to
continue to be around, but with a few less people. This has probably been
discussed before--will search.

 _EDIT_ doesn't look like LShift is dead. From the press release, they spun
off another company for Rabbit, potentially in response to acquisition
inquiries, and will just lose a few people it seems.

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misteron
No, indeed I can confirm that LShift is very much alive and shifting into new
ventures. Some of the guys moved over to Spring/VMW but the rest of us are
still here on the corner of Hoxton Square, but we are recruiting like crazy
right now...so if you happen to know anyone who fits the profile, please point
them our way... Mike

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shiftb
I'm pretty sure the founder of EY is the one (not) mentioned in this
TechCrunch article... [http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/oops-beware-the-
accidental-...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/oops-beware-the-accidental-
post-to-twitter-contemplating-an-acquisition/)

I hope it's true and I hope it changes his life. VMWare has a decent track
record considering they're a big company.

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jpcx01
Say it ain't so!!

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petercooper
I've been thinking about this quite a bit tonight and I think it'd be a good
move for VMware. They've made some interesting, and smart, moves lately
towards becoming _sort of_ the next _Sun_ (in a brains and technology sense,
not the hardware company that unceremoniously gets acquired by Oracle sense).
Bringing Redis onboard, as well as purchasing Gemstone Systems, are two things
that stick out for me.

A VMware acquisition of EY would be interesting for the Ruby world in
particular, as VMware would then have the JRuby team, most of the defacto core
Rubinius team, and the Maglev team on its payroll. An acquisition of Phusion,
Heroku or similar players in Ruby implementations and deployment might then be
natural next targets - and with over $2bn in cash, VMware easily has the money
to make these deals without breaking a sweat.

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jpcx01
Ah, very interesting possibilities! I'm still worried about taking an ultra
productive startup like EngineYard and placing it in the "machinery" of a big
corporate entity like VMWare. But maybe it would allow some really cool teams
to work together closely to build the ultimate ruby deployment platform.

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swombat
I wonder if EngineYard really qualifies as "ultra-productive" still...

