Spring (previously known as SpringSource) was a software company founded by Rod Johnson, who also created the Spring Framework, an open-source application framework for enterprise Java applications. VMware purchased Spring for $420 million in August 2009.^[1]

Originally incorporated by Rod Johnson in 2004 as Interface21, the company was renamed SpringSource in 2007 to better reflect its association with the Spring Framework.^[2] Over time, most Spring developers were employed full-time. Spring is open source. The company was eventually renamed Spring.^[when?]

Spring acquired Covalent Technologies on January 29, 2008, which was then one of the leading contributors to Apache Tomcat.^[3][4]

Several other acquisitions then followed:

• G2One, the company behind Apache Groovy and Grails, acquired in November 2008^[5]
• Hyperic, which developed a tool for monitoring Java applications and their environment, acquired in May 2009^[6]
• Cloud Foundry, a Platform as a Service provider, acquired in August 2009^[7]

Using these acquisitions, the company's business expanded beyond support for its application frameworks, Spring and Grails. It went on to offer a suite of software products across all three stages of the enterprise Java application life cycle: build (develop), run (deploy), and manage. SpringSource created two commercial server products specifically aimed at Spring developers: TC Server, a commercial version of Tomcat integrated with Hyperic for deployment and management, and DM Server, an OSGi based server which never was commercially viable.^{[citation needed]} After spending millions on development with no result, it was subsequently donated to the Eclipse Foundation as the Virgo project. Both servers came with a number of customer support options.

In August 2009, SpringSource was purchased for $420 million by VMware,^[1] where it was maintained for some time as a separate division within VMware. The commercial products were rebadged as the vFabric Application Suite. Acquisitions continued including RabbitMQ (an open-source AMQP message broker), Redis (an open source, noSQL key-value store) and Gemstone (developer of several data-management products). These products (except Redis) also became part of the vFabric product set.

In April 2013, VMware, along with its parent company EMC Corporation, formally created a joint venture (with GE) called Pivotal Software. All of VMware's application-oriented products, including Spring, were transferred to this organization.^[8][9] VMWare reacquired Pivotal in 2019 ^[10] and folded it into the Tanzu application suite.^[10]

VMware sold the Gemstone object database products to GemTalk Systems in May 2013.^[11] Pivotal ended their sponsorship of Groovy/Grails in March 2015.^[12]