VMware said the acquisition, announced Monday afternoon, will lead to new products making it easier to build, run and manage applications both internally and on external cloud platforms.

The privately held SpringSource has already approved the acquisition, which is expected to close in the third quarter, according to VMware. SpringSource, founded in 2005 with headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., makes Web application development and management tools with a heavy emphasis on open source.

Web application development goes beyond , but the company is trying to position itself as a management vendor for all aspects of cloud environments.

"Today’s modern computing environments are moving to an application and data-centric world powered by state of the art virtualized and cloud computing platforms," VMware CEO Paul Maritz said in a statement on the acquisition. "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."