Recently VMWare announced its planned acquisition of the privately held Java tools vendor SpringSource. Perhaps it’s one more indication that applications and workloads will increasingly rely on a virtualized (and eventually a cloud-based) infrastructure.

For service providers, this represents yet another area of opportunity for them to create value for their customers. Should we anticipate that the industry-leader in server virtualization will more tightly integrate application deployment and management with the physical and virtual server infrastructure?

According to Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum, “The deal marries hardware virtualization with a form of application virtualization, where logic is abstracted from the underlying plumbing. Combine the two, and you have a stack carrying the elasticity of dynamic, economical cloud deployment, regardless of whether it is deployed inside or outside the customer’s data center.”