SpringSource and Rabbit Technologies will bound into the future together with today’s announcement that VMware’s SpringSource division is acquiring Rabbit Technologies, the company behind the RabbitMQ Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) message queue. The move expands the scope of SpringSource, and by extension, VMware’s middleware stacks.
Rod Johnson, general manager of VMware’s SpringSource division, said that the open-source RabbitMQ has become the de facto standard for message queues in cloud environments.
“There’s a synergy with our own enterprise middleware business. But looking forward, messaging is a fundamental element for how applications are built, and this is even more true for tomorrow’s applications,” he said. “The entire industry is focused on the architectural building blocks of cloud. Messaging is critical to cloud applications.”
RabbitMQ and the AMQP specification got their start in the financial sector, but Alexis Richardson, CEO of Rabbit Technologies, said that today, finance only accounts for 10%–15% of overall RabbitMQ users.
“One of the ways RabbitMQ has been successful is that even though AMQP was born in the financial sector, it doesn’t mean it’s usefulness is only in that sector,” said Richardson. Despite SpringSource’s focus on Java, Richardson said RabbitMQ will continue to be compatible with other languages, such as .NET, Python and Ruby.
Johnson pointed out that while there are plans in the works to build integrations for RabbitMQ into Spring, the focus of those integrations will be the AMQP specification, not specifically the RabbitMQ implementation of that specification.
“We want to emphasize having really good AMQP integrations so Spring developers can easily build applications that use RabbitMQ,” he said. “There will also be integration with other technology that VMware is building in the cloud. That innovation will not be limited to Java.”
Johnson was unable to give details on future product integrations, but Richardson did say that SpringSource’s management layer, formerly known as Hyperic, would be an excellent place to find synergy between Rabbit Technologies and SpringSource.
Richardson also said that the RabbitMQ project has no plans to change its licensing or open-source policies now that the acquisition has closed. The purchase of Rabbit Technologies by SpringSource was completed April 13, but the negotiations for the purchase have been in the works since at least the middle of last year. As Rabbit Technologies was a privately held company, the purchase price of this acquisition was not disclosed.
