Virtualization infrastructure provider VMware announced today that it will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource's stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.

Within the last 6 months, SpringSource has extended its reach deep into the runtime and application management arena with the acquisition of Hyperic last May, and the release of the SpringSource tc server in April.   The acqusition signals the further confluence of virtualization/cloud infrastructure technology with application development platforms, such as the Spring Framework.

According to SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson, the broader transformation in IT goes beyond Java frameworks, tooling and runtime infrastructure:

"The way in which people think about software stacks is changing. Virtualization is reshaping the data center, and cloud computing is set to drive far-reaching changes," says Johnson. "Significantly, cloud computing blurs the division between development and operations, bringing new power (and responsibility) to developers."

Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers. Steve Herrod, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D at VMWare further comments on the marriage of the two platforms in his blog:

"We will do this (intersect the two technologies) by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions. A lot of our early “vApp” thinking has been based on this separation of application code from the requirements it has on the infrastructure on which it will be running.."

DZone will be providing additional details on this breaking story as more information becomes available.