Last week, VMware announced that it was acquiring open source company SpringSource, the driving force behind Spring and Hyperic along with employing key contributors and leaders for other open source projects (Apache Tomcat, Groovy and Grails). This acquisition helps VMware move beyond their current virtualization focus and into enterprise software in the cloud with a strong play toward public and private cloud solutions. Here’s a diagram from SpringSource that starts to show how everything fits together:

With the current growth rate of cloud computing, it isn’t surprising to see VMware increase their focus on the cloud. “Worldwide cloud services revenue is on pace to surpass $56.3 billion in 2009, a 21.3 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $46.4 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The market is expected to reach $150.1 billion in 2013.”

While cloud computing seems to be a primary focus of the SpringSource acquisition, it also gives VMware a much stronger position in enterprise deployment, provisioning, and manageability of the environment. Sam Dean sees the acquisition as “a platform play from VMware, emphasizing enterprise software stacks, software development, scalable environments in data centers, and virtualization for making data centers easily fluent with multiple operating systems and environments. It’s also evidence that VMware is paying more attention to open source competition.”

VMware has been facing more and more competition from the operating system vendors. With this combination of virtualization and enterprise software, people are talking about how VMware is positioning itself to more effectively address this competition. Matt Asay says that operating systems become less relevant when you have virtualization and cloud computing technologies like the model in the diagram above.

Adrian Colyer, SpringSource CTO, and Steve Harrod, VMware CTO, both wrote a greats posts with more technical details about how the VMware and SpringSource technologies combine virtualization and enterprise Java to focus on enterprise software deployment and cloud computing. Both are definitely worth a read if you want to learn more about how the technologies will work together.

. Read the rest at Intel.com.