The old

I do not expect anything to happen to SpringSource’s open source products; in other words, the entire Spring Portfolio, tc Server and dm Server will remain free for us to explore and use.

The new

So, what new can SpringSource offer? Well, VMWare are in the virtualisation game, therefore I think they will offer virtualised enterprise solutions built on the Spring Portfolio and either tc Server or dm Server.
Imagine being able to download (still for free) a pre-configured dm Server or tc Server appliance. Download it, start it, and presto, you have a pre-configured enterprise-ready application server. Now, let’s take it up a notch. Imagine that these appliances allow themselves to be automatically discovered. All you need now is a central appliance (call it orchestrator, manager or clever load balancer). This central appliance would discover the tc Server or dm Server appliances on the network, monitor them, and provide a central point for deploying your applications.
Such approach would take away most of the pain of today’s enterprise deployment. You deploy to the orchestrator appliance and it then propagates the new version of the application to its worker appliances. Now, the orchestrator appliance may have access to a pool of shutdown worker appliances and it may be able to start them up if the load suddenly increases.
I think this is where the big money is: enterprises will be happy to pay licenses for the orchestrator appliance, because it solves so many headaches.

When?

So, when is this exciting future coming? I don’t know — in fact, I have no idea. But one thing is certain: if SpringSource do not start working on the orchestrator appliance, we at Cake Solutions will.