SpringSource acquires Hyperic

A third acquisition marks SpringSource as a potential consolidator in open source

While there had been some rumblings about a possible deal for a while, this week SpringSource formally announced the acquisition of Hyperic, the leading open source management monitoring company. This combines two of the strongest open source infrastructure players and positions SpringSource as a potential consolidator in the open source industry. In fact, this is SpringSource's third major acquisition in 18 months, having previously acquired Covalent and G2One, the company behind Groovy and Grails.

SpringSource is not as big as some of the other players in the industry, but it now has key technologies that will define the next generation of software infrastructure, making the transition from development to deployment much smoother. With the Hyperic acquisition, SpringSource can now provide management and monitoring of a broad range of open source and closed source infrastructure products.  As an interesting aside, this latest acquisition is a reunion of two teams acquired by SpringSource: Covalent (acquired in January 2008) and Hyperic (which spun off from Covalent in 2004.)

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At MySQL, we had a long-standing partnership with Hyperic that dates back to when they were just five guys doing everything from working on the product to closing deals. We licensed the SIGAR technology for use in the MySQL Enterprise Monitor. And Hyperic used MySQL for its underlying storage, enabling the company to scale by a factor of 10 to 2.3 million metrics collected per minute. Through the years, we got to know and appreciate the depth of talent at Hyperic as well as their business integrity. Hopefully, SpringSource will give the Hyperic team, and CEO Javier Soltero in particular, big roles in driving the company forward. There aren't many teams as talented as the one the Hyperic founders created.