Rumor: VMware in talks to acquire Engine Yard

http://gigaom.com/2010/06/10/vmware-in-talks-to-acquire-engineyard/

by petercooper • 16 years ago

37 17 16 years ago

jpcx012• 16 years ago

Say it ain't so!!

petercooper2• 16 years ago

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.

jpcx012• 16 years ago

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.

rmoriz• 16 years ago

I guess VMware itself is soon an interesting target to buy in.

Consider the cloud computing business is dominated by Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft and Google, other companies with even more money on the bank need to buy in on a strategic perspective.

Maybe Apple should buy VMware? Or what about HP or Dell?

It's hard to tell and maybe the buyer will split VMWare again into an infrastructure and software/framework part.

For us Ruby developers it's cool if they keep sponsoring the Engine Yard Opensource efforts (JRuby, Rubinius, and so much more) and the professional services.

Personally I thought that Amazon might take over EY and Heroku and put them together into one business. Both are dead without EC2. As Dropbox would be without S3...

plinkplonk• 16 years ago

"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

jamie• 16 years ago

Excluding the graphics company, it sounds like they're trying to build out an application suite that makes it easy to keep firing up new vmware nodes as you grow.

My guess is what you're seeing is the slow buildout of a platform to provide the enterprise with it's own app store.

Think about it this way: what's a huge risk to VMWare's business? Customers deciding that moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud because the scaling and uptime requirements are too expensive to do in house.

Every company that moves their Exchange mailboxes to Google Apps is a lost VMWare customer.

acangiano• 16 years ago

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

lapusta• 16 years ago

And RabbitMQ.

moolave• 16 years ago

Definitely creating a virtual app product that will take over the market share of HP, Sun, Dell, IBM, etc. Someone was predicting the cloud network will be a trillion dollar market so they are positioning themselves for it.

Some cloud and virtual NAS/SAN companies are happy too. =)

whatusername• 16 years ago

http://www.thebiggertruth.com/2010/06/and-the-battles-yet-be... has a pretty good take - on VMWare vs Oracle and "Level 2 big iron"

kordless• 16 years ago

It's a do-it-yourself PaaS strategy.

Where's the load balancing acquisition?

shiftb• 16 years ago

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-...

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

Rumor: VMware in talks to acquire Engine Yard

Related Stories