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SpringSource Acquires Hyperic, Possibly Set to Target Microsoft and IBM
Many sources are reporting that SpringSource has acquired Hyperic, creating a company that could go after IBM and Microsoft. SpringSource has long dreamed of being able to offer a complete open source solution that accelerates the entire build, run, manage Java application lifecycle, and Hyperic offers the last piece of the puzzle. "Regardless, the SpringSource/Hyperic combination creates a clear and present danger to IBM and Microsoft, two companies that have largely stood alone in the ability to build, run, and manage applications. It's also a significant boon to companies looking to open source to save money and improve productivity. Is it a sign of good things to come from not only SpringSource, but also open source, generally? Time will tell, but I suspect we're on the cusp of an aggressive and ambitious new phase in open-source competition."
expecting chair storms
Microsoft and IBM have lots of competitors (Oracle comes readily to mind). What makes this different, besides the fact I've never heard of either of these companies? A blogger I've also never heard of who wants hits?
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
I don't mean anything bad by SpringSource, but those of us in the trenches that have had their pre-purchase findings ignored in favor of some dog-awful monstrosity of an application understand that they probably don't have much of a chance unless they score better 'incentives' than an IBM or Microsoft rep. Along with some very flexible morals, it takes deeep pockets.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
From the summary, it sounds like the company would try to acquire Microsoft and IBM next. Only later it becomes clear that going after refers to their product offerings. Good luck with that, not that they need it with their obviously superior quality.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
1. Who the hell is SpringSource?
2. Who the hell is Hyberic?
Regardless, the SpringSource/Hyperic combination creates a clear and present danger to IBM and Microsoft...
Unless SpringSource or Hyperic has a few billion dollars in the bank that I'm blissfully unaware of, or their own nuclear arsenal, I don't believe this blogger is using the phrase "clear and present danger" in a manner consistent with reality.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"long dreamed of being able to offer a complete open source solution that accelerates the entire build, run, manage Java application lifecycle, and Hyperic offers the last piece of the puzzle."
Let me succinctly summarize their product: VAPORWARE
Yours In Communism,
Kilgore Trout
Yes, some Java startup is going to bring down Microsoft and IBM. And pigs will fly out my ass. Give me a fucking break.
*The TV glows to life in a moment; it's News at 11*
In other news, journalist makes laughable prediction that two companies you've never heard of can threaten two of the largest companies in existence. Media-watchers cynically called this a blogger stunt to boost website hits, noting that sites such as Slashdot "drive a lot of hits" which, combined with Google Adsense, turns into cash for news site, Cnet.com, which hosted the article. Comments, Linda?
News organizations cynically driving consumers to their web pages with fake news, how low can you go?
(laughing) You tell 'em.
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"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Didn't you read the summary? These guys have long dreamed of being able to offer a solution. Plus they're totally unknown underdogs. That means they're just one montage away from coming out on top. Yay!
Slashdot 2.0 sucks balls. I'm adding this shit to my hosts file, I have had enough. This site used to be the greatest. But they messed with a great thing, and now it's dead to me. I'm taking Slashdot out on a boat and shooting it in the head. So long, everyone.
Two companies you've never heard of merge to create a unified company you won't remember in a week and present no danger what-so-ever to Microsoft nor IBM. I mean, seriously. Let's be real here.
I'd like to see how well they compete with open source solutions first (Django, Rails), before getting excited about conquering the whole industry.
It seem they are still dragging that Albatross "Java" in their nets, hopefully it can do a few more tricks,
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I'm not knocking their products, but until they get their stuff Common Criteria, FIPS, and ICSA certified, not many large companies will be darkening their door.
They have quite an uphill battle, and are trying to compete against well entrenched competition with products that have been out for decades.
I wish them luck, and I think they will find a niche in some shops, but the article is overhyping them -- they are not going to be able to go to bat against the big guys anytime soon.
...even I know that SpringSource is behind the Spring Framework which is one of the most popular Java Enterprise Frameworks in use today. It's not like they aren't already in the market. This aquisition just allows SpringSource to have an end to end solution. Most of the comments so far are completely devoid of any knowledge on the subject whatsoever. A quick read through the article and a google search for SpringSource would be enough to enlighten people why this is important. Unfortunately that is too much to ask from most slashdotters.
Time makes more converts than reason
Azul Systems is a company that specializes in accelerating Java workloads on Sun, IBM, and X86 machines. I see Azul as being at least as important to a "complete" Java solution as SpringSource and Hypernic..
Looked interesting till I read 'Java'.
/* No Comment */
Rails, Django, Joomla, PHP, Java.
COBOL, PL/1, RPG.
Same shi7, different generation. These are the languages for the lightweights; however, history has proven, they will be in strong demand long after the ASSEMBLER, FORTAN, C, C++ and PERL guys have been eclipsed by something New --though not in the USA and not at $100/hr (like the COBOL boys enjoyed)...(something about nearly 35% of a Billion people wanting to feed themselves by learning to program on the Interweb, LOL). SpringSource/Hyberbic --sounds pretty foreign to me... Thank you Vincent Cerf and RMS!
...but how much revenue does SpringSource actually get out of it? If it's like a bunch of other open source tools, there's a very small percentage of customers that make the leap from "user" to "paying user".
The Army reading list
It sounds like Spring Source has really acquired lots of Hyperbole.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
i call bullshit.
the largest cost for any java project i've seen has been fixing defects and adding enhancements. and if you're a consultant, the large number of manager leeches piggy backing off developers billable hours.
the vast majority of sites are fine on one box. and there's a large group of sites that are fine with 2-4 boxes with a sticky session loadbalancer to provide scalability before you get to sites that get a return on investment from something li azul.
only a very very small subset of applications require the scalability provided by azul or even clustering beyond maybe session replication / shared cache.
Thinking of the endless very public psats between JBoss and SpringSource over the years it is oddly fascinating to watch SpringSource gradually becoming the vendor it always claimed to hate.
From an enterprise Java perspective SpringSource has always truck me as being the worst possible kind of company. They use open source as a veneer to obscure the fact that almost everything they do locks you to their framework and implementation. The thing that made them famous is basically a dependency injection framework - nice enough (though horribly XML heavy) but hardly earth shattering and has been done better since by Google's Guice to pick but one example. With JavaEE 6 offering a standard DI framework based on Guice and JBoss Seam they're looking for another trick. They've got a badged fork of Tomcat which they're trying to pass of as a lightweight application server (hint - its still just a f*cking servlet container) and with this move they can now offer production monitoring software to offer a complete soloution. Doubtless Oracle, JBoss and Microsoft are shaking in their boots.
What I haven't been able to make out of either of the company's website's, is whether they offer 'only' a servlet engine like Tomcat, or a full J2EE Application Server ? It seems to me like they would need at least a full J2EE Application Server like Geronimo to make any sort of threat ?
Shill~~~~ S H I L L
Companies nobody has heard of aren't competition for IBM/MS. This isn't revolutionary. Sounds like a company head or a shill.
Hyperic is a GPLed monitoring solution sorta akin to Nagios. I use it to give me my monitoring for my Linux & Windows servers, but also it runs queries against our data vendor's database to ensure that the database is responsive.
I inherited it, which was the first time I ran across it, but after using it I'm a big convert. I recommend taking a serious look at it.
As to the takeover, well, I doubt it'll affect me one way or the other.
No, *I* call bullshit.
A website that has no traffic doesn't care. Case in point - yours, I expect.
Websites which succeed are often victims of their own success. There is a point where companies can't buy *boxes* fast enough to cope with demand. At that point, your idea that no-one needs more than 2-4 boxes looks a little weak. At that point you need a scalability solution yesterday.
This might seem "niche" until you realize that no one makes money selling solutions to websites that don't have any traffic.
Really, how hard is it to throw in a "monitoring app" somewhere along with all the hyperbole, so people can actually tell if they give a damn?
Yeah, yeah, this is (- A billion, Redundant), but where's the sorely needed (-1, Terrible summary)?
sic transit gloria mundi
Is that a swine flu reference?
... or has anyone else noticed a huge increase in the anti-IBM sentiment on Slashdot? I know the company is not generally popular, but it seems like every other day there is essentially an advertisement for something or other that is supposed to take IBM down.
Is IBM the new Microsoft (who themselves were the the IBM)?
Yay for Java apps becoming even more over-engineered than they already are. What really cracks me up is that Spring is presented as a "lightweight" solution, or indeed a solution that solves significant problems. I will take a hand-coded factory over an XML configuration file, so I can step right into it in the debugger without any problems. I will pass around a context object to avoid using AOP and be able to debug my apps. Some parts of Spring are nice, but people seem to use the worst ones. And as a result, you're condemning yourself to JAR hell, since Spring pulls in a dozen JARs, some versions of which might not match with the ones you use in your app. People just cross their fingers and hope it will work. :-)
The problem is that a lot of the Java devs I've met don't think they can let out a fart without using Spring, IoC and AOP and as a result they drastically overengineer the simplest programs and make them hard to maintain and debug.
I have a java project, which basically exposes web-services (jax-ws) and it's built on java 1.5+ standard. I considered Spring when I was starting the project a couple years ago. However, I thought that they didn't offer much (for me) with regards to web services and I thought that the point of Spring was to get away from EJBs, which as of java 1.5 are vastly simpler and lighter weight.
So, I've basically been under the impression that Spring would die either as java dies, or as java integrates much of its functionality. What do they bring to the table? I'd honestly like to know.
To me, this is a dying company struggling to stay relevant - but I could certainly be wrong.
... build, run and manage business applications". ...
I'm sorry I didn't read any further. And I was to fast in closing the tabs to copy/paste the URLs. Go look yourself if you're really interested.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There's more to life and computers than Java.
Let us pray so that this evil will be striken from our eyes:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of pointers, I will fear no leaks: For GC art with me...
This might seem "niche" until you realize that no one makes money selling solutions to websites that don't have any traffic.
Not true in the slightest. For every site that needs 20 boxes, there are probably 2,000 that work just fine on a single box. The market in small site applications is _much_ larger than the market for big, resource intensive sites.
What I haven't been able to make out of either of the company's website's, is whether they offer 'only' a servlet engine like Tomcat, or a full J2EE Application Server ? It seems to me like they would need at least a full J2EE Application Server like Geronimo to make any sort of threat ?
Neither. SpringSource's main product is Spring Framework, which is a library designed to assist with Java enterprise programming and coexists with either a servlet engine or an app server (but is designed to reduce the need for a full app server in cases that are borderline to needing one). Hyperic's product is a server monitoring framework which, like Spring, can work equally well with either. Neither produces an actual server, whether for servlets or an application server.
Hyperic => Hyperbolic
Yeah, and Rational Software used to be a separate company too. Does anyone really think SpringSource will be a threat for any significant length of time?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Dear whatever no name company I've never heard of, heed my piece of advice:
Be careful how you meddle in the affairs of extraterrestrial races you don't understand well, for your brain is highly assimilatable.
Sincerely:
Greg of Microsoft Borg, Drone in Unimatrix 22 subjunction 12
...in bed
Wait, no. SpringSource/Hyperic aren't foreign companies. It's a venture capital / holding firm transaction up in Silicon Valley, which is the brain-dead center of the IT universe (except for hardware, late-80s database systems and, yes, Java ROFLMAO).
Buzzword Bingo: you win it.