VMware and SpringSource together will help customer data centers and cloud providers host platform-as-a-service offerings that let end users build Web applications. VMware indicated these platforms will rely on its own hypervisor technology, but also pledged to support open source.

"VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community," VMware said.

SpringSource itself has been acquisitive, for example in May, and in November , which provides training and support for the open source Groovy language and the related Web application development framework Grails.

SpringSource's technology is used by a majority of Global 2000 companies, and the open source Spring Framework supports half of all enterprise Java projects, according to VMware. SpringSource is also responsible for Apache Tomcat, the world's most widely used Java application server, the company said.