VMware’s WaveMaker Acquisition Is A Smart Buy

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Neelan Choksi, president and chief operating officer at Tasktop Technologies, who formerly played a similar role at SpringSource, told eWEEK, “This acquisition seems completely consistent with SpringSource’s history of trying to make enterprise Java development accessible to all and seems like a natural progression from Spring itself to the SpringSource Tool Suite to Roo and now to WaveMaker.”

Indeed, although the Spring Framework helps eliminate much of the complexity of enterprise Java development, Spring, with its AOP (aspect-oriented programming) support is not for the squeamish. It is a professional developer’s platform.

What is more, with his history and erstwhile proximity to the Spring effort, Choksi added a bit more perspective. “For me personally, this is quite interesting because in 2007-2008 when Rod Johnson was living in Noe Valley and I was spending half my work days there, WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene also lived in Noe Valley in San Francisco. Chris started a Noe Valley geek crew that would go out and grab drinks at various local watering holes. It’s quite interesting to see how those early conversations have now come full circle.”

Quick wins?

However, some say they do not see the value in the WaveMaker acquisition. Commenting on Rod Johnson’s blog post announcing the WaveMaker acquisition, a responder identified as “Bob” said, “Reading between the lines, Spring (in my personal opinion) is having trouble finding a coherent strategy to make enough money to justify the $340 million that VMware paid to acquire Spring.”

Following VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource in 2009, Sacha Labourey, former JBoss/Red Hat executive and founder CEO of CloudBees, said:

“IMO, that is exactly what led to this acquisition. VMware had to own a middleware solution and other options were too costly. SpringSource’s acquisition gives VMware several quick-wins: a foot in the middleware game, a developer community, a recognised brand in middleware and, last but not least, a seat on the JCP [Java Community Process].”

Yet, moving back to present day, for his part, Johnson lays out why VMware’s WaveMaker acquisition makes sense going forward and builds on the points Labourey outlined and sniped at in his insightful post.

More Spring goodness to come

Indeed, Johnson said there is more to come, including more “Spring goodness.” Regarding the future, Johnson said:

We’re excited about the future. Some of the highlights you can expect:

• Close alignment with Spring Roo will ensure consistent architecture between Spring Roo and WaveMaker applications and enable developers to work on WaveMaker applications at three levels: in traditional code-only style; in code-oriented fashion turbo-charged by Spring Roo; and with the WaveMaker graphical environment. This will be a uniquely compelling set of choices.
• WaveMaker as a service will fit naturally with our cloud computing strategy, including Code2Cloud.
• Currently WaveMaker builds applications using as inputs database tables and web service endpoints. We have lots more Spring goodness to work with. We will enrich this functionality through exposing many other features of Spring, such as Spring Integration and Spring Social endpoints, along with other cloud services.

Moreover, in his own post on the acquisition, WaveMaker’s Keene addressed the growing popularity of the WaveMaker technology. “As WaveMaker went from 3,000 downloads a month in January, 2010 to 135,000 downloads a month in December, 2010, we realised that we had created the perfect ‘on ramp’ for cloud computing. WaveMaker can play a big role in bringing large numbers of developers to the cloud, but only if we team with the right cloud partner,” he said. “With VMware and SpringSource, we have found that partner,” Keene added.