VMware Preps Its Platform Play With Acquisition of Rabbit Technologies

VMware is poised to take another step in the creation of its own platform as a service (PaaS) after it announced the acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, the force behind the open source RabbitMQ messaging technology. The newly acquired company will become part of VMware's SpringSource division, which was itself a recent acquisition of VMware in August 2009. SpringSource is an open source vendor of enterprise Java and web application development and management software.

According to the company "SpringSource will add the RabbitMQ open messaging system into its suite of technologies that reduce the complexity associated with development, deployment and management of enterprise applications." Together, they could go along way towards solving some of the issues around cloud interoperability. Furthermore, "as organizations increasingly build and deploy applications in a cloud environment, the infrastructure to support this new model is evolving. A new type of lightweight, reliable, scalable and portable messaging system is required to support the routing of user requests to the appropriate resources regardless of where they may reside."

Rod Johnson, general manager of the SpringSource division of VMware, explained: “While messaging has always been a key infrastructure element used in the creation of enterprise applications, cloud applications require a fundamentally different messaging infrastructure. By adding RabbitMQ to our suite, SpringSource can extend its emerging application platform with another element of technology that is critical to modern virtual and cloud deployment models.”