VMware - current dominator of the virtualization solutions market - announced on Monday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase San Mateo, Calif.-based open-source software platform developer SpringSource. VMware hopes the move will enable it to achieve better integration between the layer that touches the hardware and the layer that touches the applications.

"It's about making virtualization more application-aware," VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz said in a conference call. "We need to have both the virtualization talent and the application-facing talent inside the company and working together."

Together, the two firms will develop integrated platform-as-a-service solutions for data centers and cloud service providers. VMware aims for these solutions to enable customers to quickly build new enterprise and Web applications that can be managed in scalable vSphere-based internal and external clouds that also allow them to host and manage their existing applications.

VMware's move was its response to a current industry trend, where "applications are no longer directly being written to Linux or Windows, but are being written to these third-generation frameworks." The real opportunity, Maritz said, was integrating these frameworks with the underlying virtualization layer that touches the hardware.

"We have to get deeper integration," Maritz said. "Having both the hardware-facing asset and the application-facing asset allows us to have that integration. We believe that this is an essential step if you're going to be able to really significantly take complexity out of the environment."

VMware will acquire SpringSource for a combination of cash and equity, worth a total of about $362 million and an "assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options," according to a VMware statement. The buyer expects to close the acquisition in the third quarter of this year.

SpringSource's programming framework is widely used by Java project developers across the world. During the past two years, the company has contributed most of the bug fixes to the Apache Tomcat Java application server. SpringSource also leads Groovy and Grails, a growing language and Web application framework.

VMware - in its statement - has pledged to support the company's principles of having an open-source model and ensuring interoperability of its software with a breadth of middleware software. SpringSource leverages its credible standing with the developer community and makes its money by selling support and professional subscription services, Maritz said.