VMForce: A new lease of life for Enterprise Java?

Last week, VMWare and Salesforce.com unveiled their much anticipated joint venture: VMforce.com. In a nutshell, VMforce is an IaaS/PaaS (Infrastructure as a service/Platform as a service) offering for development and deployment of Enterprise java application using the Spring framework.

This is very big news for 2 groups of information technologists: cloud computing observers and Java developers. When VMWare and Salesforce.com join forces, they form a formidable alliance that has very strong cloud computing infrastructure experience (in Force.com) and powerful application development framework and application deployment technologies from Vmware. If execute right and at the right price point, Vmforce will be very competitive with the existing major players in the cloud computing space: Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.

For Java developers, this is great news because with this offering, the 4-5 million of Java developers in the world can be assured that they can develop Java application locally and deploy it in the cloud across multiple platforms (desktop or mobile), and not to worry about the infrastructure or the deployment process that support the application itself. In a way, this is much more scalable than barebones cloud computing services offering such as AWS, as the management the application stack and balancing of application servers become very complicated as the application usage grows.

Having used Force.com through our own Salesforce implementation before and experience their great technical support system, I have great confidence in SFDC’s ability to deliver superior support for Vmforce. The fact that it is supported by the Spring framework which is the most popular and influential Java framework out there also gives it a lot of credibility and flexibility.

From the perspective of a VC, I am also interested in this for two reasons:
– I believe that the Vmforce IaaS model will be very beneficial for start ups and expansion stage companies as it potentially takes care of all the IT scaling pains that these companies encounter as they grow.
– With the development of a platform as such, there will be new companies aimed at providing value add services and technologies to enhance and extend Vmforce, and if Vmforce is going to be successful, these companies are going to be great prospects for venture capital investments as well.