VMware has completed its acquisition of enterprise Java vendor SpringSource, a $US362 million deal designed to help customers build, run and manage applications to be run on cloud-based platforms.

VMware first announced the deal in early August and this week said it has closed the transaction. VMware appears to have high hopes for SpringSource, giving the company's executives time to speak on the main stage of the annual VMworld conference held in San Francisco two weeks ago.

SpringSource CEO and founder Rod Johnson promised the combination of the two companies will make it easier to move applications from "code to cloud." Johnson will stay on as general manager and SpringSource will become a division of VMware.

VMware says the acquisition will lead to integrated products based on VMware's vSphere virtualization software and SpringSource's application development tools. The goal is to help enterprises and service providers create platform-as-a-service offerings, or Web-based platforms for building and hosting applications.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz noted that SpringSource comes from the application development world, a different context than the one VMware is accustomed to working in. But the companies have collaborated closely over the past year and VMware "became so impressed that we put our money where our mouth is," Maritz said at VMworld.

Maritz pledged to retain SpringSource's open source commitment, saying "they are an open source company, and we intend that they continue to be an open source company. We think it's crucial in working with developers and learning what's really going on."

SpringSource and its lightweight frameworks for building applications will help eliminate layers of complexity in IT, and make it easier to create workloads that can work both internally in a customer's data center and on a public cloud platform, Maritz said.

"We believe in the long run the right way to solve this is to focus on virtualization and a new generation of lightweight frameworks. That will bring radical simplification," Maritz says.