You can get 4.1.2 here. Have at it!

Thanks to all the users, customers, and engineers that contributed to this release.

Today we are proud to announce that Hyperic has been acquired by SpringSource. It’s been a pretty exciting couple of months here at our San Francisco headquarters. Luckily our team hasn’t missed a beat in our continued quest to build a great software company.

Why is this a Good Thing?

This combined company will provide the widest choice of market-leading products — from a single vendor — that address the needs of developers AND operations.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the divide between developers and operations is a huge obstacle in building more scalable, manageable applications. Hyperic’s most successful customers seem to be the ones who’ve built manageability into their apps, as opposed to those that simply monitor and manage the products the app is built on. These customers use Hyperic technology to gain a better understanding of the behavior and limits of their apps and are more successful at the fine art of keeping them running at optimal performance.

Hyperic has been working hard to help tear down the brick wall that often exists between operations and development. In fact, we started this company because the founders (all developers) knew all too well how tough and distracting it was to be a developer called into firefighting situations (Backflip.com comes to mind…). We started by accepting the incredible responsibility of providing software that wakes ops people up when things inevitably go wrong. We soon realized that there was a bigger opportunity to provide products that help both developers and operations be successful. SpringSource’s acquisition of Hyperic enables us to seize this opportunity as one company. Rod & the SpringSource team agree.

Joining forces with SpringSource gives us the opportunity to reach legions of developers and bring to life the vision of a full lifecycle company. One company which provides modern, open tools, runtimes, and management solutions that are (as described in the Spring Framework mission statement) “a pleasure to use” : developer tools like SpringSource Tool Suite, runtimes like  dm_server and the new tc_server, and of course management from Hyperic HQ & IQ.

As part of this acquisition, it’s important to make clear that SpringSource remains committed to Hyperic’s breadth of managed technologies. Our customers use us to manage Enterprise Java, LAMP, Windows, and Unix environments built on a mixture of open source and commercial middleware. We will continue to innovate around management of virtualized applications as well as those built in the cloud. We will do this because it is part of what makes Hyperic’s technology the top choice for managing the most demanding applications.

What about the team?

Successful acquisitions are all about people. As part of this acquisition, Hyperic’s stellar team will combine with SpringSource’s to create a world-class staff of the most creative product, support, marketing and sales people in the industry. This means that our customers and partners will continue to receive the same high level of product support and innovation from the same folks they have enjoyed working with. I will continue to own and focus on the vision for management & cloud products and will join SpringSource as CTO of Management Products.

Our employees, executives, and directors are extremely excited about the huge opportunity this combined company represents. In an time where mergers among goliaths are the norm, the teams behind two fast growing, young companies are combining to provide the world an alternative to the locked-in, old-school, painful, and expensive software of the 20th century.

How did we get here?

In 2004, our founders Doug, Charles, Ryan, John and I set out to redefine how large-scale web applications and infrastructure are managed.  We wanted to create a company built around software that was focused on the new era of operations management and capable of handling the latest Web technologies, constant change and the demanding environments of mission-critical applications. More than anything, we wanted to build a company that changed the way people evaluate, purchase, and deploy enterprise-grade management technology. I think we succeeded!  Proof of that success can be found in many hundreds of happy customers and over 5,000 open source deployments.

SpringSource has a similar vision.  Just as we revolutionized the way companies monitor and manage applications, SpringSource has defined a new era for application development with the Spring Framework. They’ve extended that now to a broader vision around run-times and management (us) to give customers and the community an entire application lifecycle platform.  Like us, SpringSource depends on the innovation and collaboration that is only possible through Open Source. Our commitment to our community will strengthen through our combination with SpringSource’s extensive experience in building great open source projects.

What’s next?

Obviously, this acquisition brings up a lot of questions.  We are 100 percent committed to providing answers and helping make this transition as seamless and transparent as possible for our customers, partners, employees and community.  As such, we have set up several forums where people can go to get more information:

• Visit the announcement landing page
• Read the press release
• Join us for a Webinar on May 20th when we will share our vision

Rod Johnson (CEO of SpringSource) also shared his thoughts on what this means for SpringSource on his blog.

I couldn’t be prouder of what we have accomplished at Hyperic over the last five years.  Today’s announcement is a testament to the top-notch product, services and sales support that we have built in our organization.

We’re excited to starting working together as the SpringSource team.

You can get 4.1.1 here. Enjoy!

And as always, thanks to the many users, customers, and engineers that contributed to this release.

Assuming an entrepreneur wants to be successful, my conclusion is that the only real choices for the basis of a new technology company are open source, the cloud (including SaaS) or innovation that can be considered “indistinguishable from magic” (with due respect to the late Arthur C. Clarke).

Why? 

The name of the game these days is to do more with less.  As such, for a business to stand a chance of surviving let alone thriving, it has to be delivered as a service through the cloud (read: easier to adopt, cheaper, more scalable) or be based around a low-cost, open, customer-driven delivery model.

…Or, you’ve got to invent something that is so groundbreaking and world-changing that the market would tolerate the old guard of closed-source innovation.  Something about which tech-savvy, forward-thinking individuals are gap-mouthed and incredulous when they first see it.  Think Linux circa 1992 (wow, UNIX on a PC), virtualization circa 1999 (what?  Windows running on Linux… with sound?!?!?!) and the iPhone circa now (the touch screen is like magic).

I’m not a futurist, of course, but short of a flying car, I’m not clear on what magic could be coming our way.  Any guesses?

According to the report, published on March 17, 2009, “cloud computing is becoming one of the most visible sourcing option for infrastructure and operations professionals. I&O professionals, thus, must be aware of how they will manage this environment from an availability, performance, disaster recovery and service aggregation point of view”.

The Gartner research report suggests IT operations organizations that are using cloud services provided by Amazon or Google should consider Hyperic products to monitor this environment. In addition, development teams desiring to better understand the performance of applications being designed for the cloud should investigate Hyperic’s offerings. We couldn’t agree more. To access the report, you’ll have to talk to Gartner first.