The deal, already agreed upon by shareholders of closely-held SpringSource, is valued at approximately $362 million in cash and equity. The two companies plan to combine their technologies to create an integrated, build-run-mange solution for the data center and private and public clouds, VMware’s president and CEO Paul Maritz said during a conference call announcing the deal late Monday.

The plan, according to Maritz, is to bring together the virtualization layer, which touches and controls the hardware, with the application framework layer, which touches the applications. Allowing "those two layers to cooperate," he said, provides a much more seamless, automatic, lower cost environment.

VMware views SpringSource as a major player in the app server market, Maritz said, pointing to the company's "very big following in the open source developer world." Maritz cited analyst estimates that half of all new Java application development work is being done in the Spring environment, and that 2 million developers "have been touched by Spring."

Source: http://redmondmag.com/articles/2009/08/10/vmware-to-acquire-springsource.aspx