Spring (company)
Spring (previously known as SpringSource) was a software company founded by Rod Johnson, who also created the Spring Framework, an open-source application framework for enterprise Java applications. It was purchased by VMware for $420 million in August 2009. History Originally incorporated by Rob Johnson in 2004 as Interface21, the company was renamed SpringSource in 2007 to better reflect its association with the Spring Framework. Over time most of the Spring developers were employed full-time by the company which offered training and consulting services to finance its activities, since Spring itself is open-source and is freely available to all. The company was eventually renamed as Spring. Recognizing that the platform of choice for most Spring applications was Apache Tomcat, Spring acquired Covalent Technologies on January 29, 2008, which was then one of the leading contributors to the project. Like Spring, Covalent was the financial vehicle supporting some of the developers of Tomcat. Several other acquisitions then followed: G2One, the company behind Apache Groovy and Grails, acquired in November 2008 Hyperic, who developed a tool for monitoring Java applications and their environment, acquired in May 2009 Cloud Foundry, a Platform as a Service provider, acquired in August 2009 As a result, SpringSource