Tuesday, March 08, 2011

WaveMaker Springs To VMware

We are announcing today that WaveMaker has been acquired by VMware. This partnership is the result of discussions that have been going on between WaveMaker and the SpringSource division of VMware for more than a year.

I have always had great respect for how Rod Johnson revitalized and simplified the Java market with the Spring framework and developer projects. When we started development of WaveMaker over three years ago, we chose Spring as our foundation.

WaveMaker is based on the Spring framework but targets a different audience: non-expert developers looking for the easiest way to build web apps.

It turns out that this is a very large market. According to Gartner, only 20% of IT staff have expert app development skills - WaveMaker is the tool to enable the other 80% of IT to build web apps quickly and deploy them to the cloud with a single mouse click.

As WaveMaker went from 3,000 downloads a month in January, 2010 to 135,000 downloads a month in December, 2010, we realized that we had created the perfect "on ramp" for cloud computing. WaveMaker can play a big role in bringing large numbers of developers to the cloud, but only if we team with the right cloud partner.

With VMware and SpringSource, we have found that partner!

The good news here is that VMware will continue to support and provide services to the WaveMaker customers, via the same team that provided it before.

For Rod’s perspective on the acquisition check out his blog post here.


10 comments:

Geert Claes said...

Contests Chris, you'll be joining Gemstone who were aqcuired by VMWare last year!

Christopher Keene said...

Following Gemstone is something I seem to do a lot. We were following Gemstone back in 1991 when we founded Persistence to develop OR mapping and caching products!

Geert Claes said...

Yep, I like and have been following their Smalltalk side of their business. Anyhow good on ya, now the PB in the cloud is at VMWare :)

Michael (of pattern) said...

Hey Chris contrats on this! Wavemaker as a software product has come very far and it's majorly thanks to your persistence and guidance. You've made a lot of good choices over the last couple of years.

Christopher Keene said...

@michael - Yes we made some good decisions, but the most important decision was to focus on building a vibrant community of which you have been an important member. Thank you!

Unknown said...

congrats Chris I hope that WM Community can be grown a lot with this

Christopher Keene said...

@manuel - this should be the best thing that ever happened to the WaveMaker community! You and all of the other leaders in the WaveMaker community played an important role in proving the value of WaveMaker to the open source world in general and to Spring in particular. Thank you!

Matt Johnston said...

Congratulations! What a fantastic validation of your vision and "persistence" -- best of luck!

AnandPandey said...

Congratulations Chris! I hope WaveMaker will continue supporting MySQL echo system through much more cohesive integration effort. There are 1000s of MySQL users rely on WaveMaker suites.

-Anand Pandey

Christopher Keene said...

@Anand - MySQL is by far the most common database used by our community. The net result of this acquisition is that by putting the resources of VMware behind the WaveMaker community, we can really open the throttle on our open source platform.