Transitioning From The Enterprise To The Cloud

By George Gilbert

This post originally appeared on GigaOm here.

VMware has finally joined Microsoft, IBM and Oracle as one of the four horsemen in the market for platforms for building, running and managing corporate and cloud applications. With its SpringSource acquisition, VMware can now compete with specialized platform-as-a-service offerings like Microsoft’s Azure. In addition, SpringSource’s introduction of Cloud Foundry yesterday makes a crucial connection between deploying Spring-based and other Java applications in the enterprise and the cloud while giving developers an increased ability to manage their applications in a self-service mode.

Before the SpringSource acquisition, VMware faced potentially diminishing returns by putting a layer that manages virtualization on ever more of the enterprise infrastructure. That layer, which VMware pioneered and dominated, cracked open Microsoft’s control of the hardware by sliding a hypervisor underneath the operating system.

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