said Monday afternoon it is acquiring SpringSource, maker of the popular open source Spring framework for Java development and related technologies, for $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of $58 million of unvested stock and options. The two companies plan to build solutions for more efficiently running, building, and managing applications within internal and external cloud architectures.

In a statement, VMware said modern computing environments are moving to an application- and data-centric world powered by virtualized and cloud platforms.  "The combination of SpringSource and VMware capitalizes on this shift and places us right at the intersection of the most important forces in the software market today -- virtualization, modern application frameworks, and cloud computing," said Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, in the statement.

VMware and SpringSource plan to develop integrated Platform-as-a-Service technologies to be hosted at customer datacenters or by cloud service providers. Customers using these technologies can build enterprise and Web applications and run these systems in the same vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can host and manage existing applications. VSphere is VMware's cloud-based OS.

"The SpringSource team and community are committed to revolutionizing the way companies build, run and manage applications," said SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson in the VMware statement. "By combining forces, I'm confident that we'll be able to deliver a set of truly remarkable solutions that dramatically simplify enterprise IT."