Hyperic acquisition binds Spring Framework to cloud

SpringSource is moving into management of public and private clouds with its third acquisition in two years.

The commercial maintainer of the ever-popular Spring Framework has bought Hyperic, an open-source systems monitoring and management specialist. Hyperic specialized in bread-and-butter datacenter activities such as event notification, reporting, and analysis but began providing status updates for applications using Amazon Web Services and Google's App Engine.

Peter Cooper-Ellis, SpringSource's senior vice president of engineering and product management, called management of the cloud and virtualized datacenters a strategic driver for the deal. SpringSource will focus on management of cloud-based applications and also of virtualized server infrastructures in the next six to 12 months he told The Reg. In addition to cloud, Hyperic supports' Citrix Systems' XenServer.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. A roadmap is expected in the next 90 days.

The deal potentially helps those building open-source, Java, Apache, Groovy, or Grails systems interested in the on-going management and provisioning of those systems. Spring stewards the open-source Spring Framework, which is used to build its own open-source, modular Java application servers. The company's also added Apache, Groovy, and Grails technology to its stack - along with a number of customers - through the separate acquisitions of Covalent and G2One.

Public clouds, such as those provided by Amazon, have been notoriously opaque when it comes to letting you know what's going on and acting if there's a problem.

Cooper-Ellis said SpringSource's would cater to those using public and private clouds, as developers experimented in the public domain and then decided to run private data centers.

Javier Soltero - Hyperic chief executive and now Spring's chief technology officer of management products - said the deal combined what he called four "key elements" of the cloud: the Spring Framework, Apache's Tomcat, Groovy, and Grails.

While much of the focus will be on the technology roadmap, there's a hidden benefit here. Hyperic brings to SpringSource a number of big customers including Comcast and Intuit, that have turned to the company to manage web applications and systems. The G21 deal brought in social network LinkedIn and UK TV broadcasting giant BskyB while NASA, Intel, and British Telecom came over with the Covalent deal. ®