When combined with VMware’s virtualised infrastructure technology, SpringSource’s products will allow both end-user organisations and hosting providers to build so-called ‘platform-as-a-service’ (PaaS) offerings, the company says. Perhaps the best known example of such an offering to date is Force.com, from on demand CRM provider Salesforce.com, on top of which customers including Morrisons Utility Services and Japan Post have built their own applications.

Dr Stephen Herrod, VMware’s chief technology officer, argues that its PaaS infrastructure will result in greater choice for end users. “Today’s PaaS offerings often force you to simultaneously commit to both a programming model and to a vendor who will host the applications written to this model,” he wrote in a blog post discussing the acquisition. “With VMware’s strategy, any vendor in the vCloud ecosystem will be able to offer a SpringSource-based PaaS offering, allowing customers to select the partner that best suits their changing needs.”

Middleware vendor Tibco Software, meanwhile, bolstered its own cloud computing strategy with its $28 million acquisition of grid computing firm DataSynapse. Later this year, Tibco is due to launch a cloud- based application development platform called Silver, which it says will bring governance, load balancing and hardware provisioning functionality to the cloud, thereby making it more amenable to enterprise organisations. Doubtless Tibco hopes to draw on DataSynapse’s experience as an early player in grid computing in developing that technology.

Hanging up on Skype
eBay has finally fulfilled its long-held desire to divest itself of VoIP provider Skype, selling a 65% stake in the company to a group led by investment firm Silver Lake for just under $2 billion. It is an admission of defeat for the online auctioneer, which realised too late that integrating a voice component into its trading platform was over-ambitious, offered limited returns and was somewhat unnecessary (one justification for the deal was that enabling sellers to talk to buyers would increase its uptake in emerging markets where haggling is very much a vocal procedure).

The deal values Skype at $2.75 billion, a flat result for eBay considering it paid $2.6 billion in 2005 but nonetheless better than expected. Skype’s new owners however face an uphill battle in a patent dispute for critical parts of the software owned by the founders. eBay will be glad to wash its hands of that particular battle.