VMware and SpringSource complement each other, said Steve Herrod, VMware CTO and senior vice president of research and development, in a blog. Both have been focused on simplifying IT, with SpringSource concentrated on application-centric areas of IT and VMware geared to hardware infrastructure, he said.

"As a combined entity, the existing efforts and missions will continue, but we'll also work to jointly sever a whole new collection of tentacles... the ones that unnaturally tie an application to the rigid way it must be deployed and managed," Herrod said.

Johnson in his blog also cited synergies. "Working together with VMware, we plan on creating a single, integrated build-run-manage solution for the datacenter, private clouds and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application infrastructure and collaboration with middleware and management components to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime," Johnson said. The solution planned will run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center or on Amazon EC2 and other environments as well as on the VMware platform, he said.

An analyst honed in on PaaS plans.

"The key thing of interest for me is the private and public PaaS talk in the press release," said analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk. "I haven't really seen anyone spin up a large 'Java in the cloud' effort and these two would be very credible at that. There's a lot of Java-based software out there that's theoretically inclined to run in cloud-ish environments if it followed J2EE distributed Java practices. Much of the cloud talk of the past year has been at the infrastructure layer and I'd assume VMWare would use SpringSource to move beyond that lowest level of the cloud stack, getting into assisting companies develop and port applications that ran on private and public clouds."