Fresh from its acquisition of Rabbit Technologies - and not all that very long after its own acquisition by VMware - SpringSource, the open source Java application framework commercializer, has gone and bought Gemstone Systems and its distributed caching technology.

The buy is supposed to flesh out its middleware and advance its strategy of delivering the application infrastructure needed by modern distributed cloud applications.

They're not disclosing the terms of the acquisition but Gemstone, which is going on 30, is beholden to no VCs, is profitable, and has a reportedly thriving legacy Smalltalk business that VMware means to keep.

The scalable Gemfire software that SpringSource really wants is supposed to make sure that the data necessary for enterprise cloud applications to work is available to them when they need it to remove latency - and that means across the network.

Unlike Rabbit and SpringSource, Gemstone is not open source; its widgetry will be integrated with its new owner's commercial distributions, the stuff sizeable accounts pay for.

SpringSource general manager Rod Johnson says there's no dominant caching vendor in a relatively broad field that includes Oracle, IBM, Terracotta and GigaSpace, and after asking customers for their opinion Gemstone seemed a choice that made them happy.

Johnson points out that "Data management technologies are fundamental to the creation of applications, and with the rise of virtualization and cloud computing, the manner in which applications need to access data is evolving. Cloud computing is a distributed deployment model, and for that reason, caching and data accessibility are of far greater strategic importance than before."

It bought Rabbit and its messaging for the same reason.

Gemstone is supposed to advance the SpringSource/VMware vision of providing the infrastructure necessary for emerging cloud-centric applications with built-in availability, scalability, security and performance guarantees.

SpringSource says these modern applications require new approaches to data management, given that they will be deployed across elastic, highly scalable, geographically distributed architectures.

SpringSource means to keep all of the Beaverton, Oregon company's staff of 100 including its president Richard Lamb.

Gemstone claims 200 large customers in mission-critical environments that rely on real-time data, including financial services, the federal government, online gaming, transportation, telecommunications and energy, folks with thousands of nodes, SpringSource's kind of meat.

SpringSource and Gemstone widgetry can be used together already and any integration will only take a few months, Johnson said. It will be used in clustered tc Servers, SpringSource's Tomcat-based application server.

According to Lamb, "Our vision for the future of data aligns completely with SpringSource and VMware, in that we believe modern applications are distributed and require data to be available in the fabric of the infrastructure. There are distributed applications - think VoIP and disaster recovery - and there are distributed deployment environments - think SpringSource's tc Server on VMware - and now SpringSource is forging ahead with the infrastructure needed for distributed data."

Besides GemStone's flagship product GemFire Enterprise, its other products include GemFire SQLFabric, a memory-oriented SQL data management platform, and GemStone/S, the platform for running distributed Smalltalk applications.