The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘springsource’

If you’re a partner at Benchmark Capital, you’re having a very good day and celebrating two separate portfolio acquisitions.

That’s sort of like an unassisted triple play in baseball, it just doesn’t happen that often. Maybe that’s why the team looks so darn happy in their website picture. Partner Peter Fenton (labeled Rock Star in photo) led both deals.

The first is Friendfeed, which was acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed sum. Benchmark was the sole venture capital investor in Friendfeed, which raised a $5 million in an early 2008. Benchmark now has stock in Facebook, the hottest IPO prospect in Silicon Valley right now.

The second is the much larger deal - VMWare’s $400+ million acquisition of Springsource, an enterprise and web application development and management startup. Benchmark was the biggest investor in Springsource, which raised a total of $15 million in two rounds of financing prior to the acquisition.

These weren’t the only wins for Benchmark this year, either. They were also investors in Pure Digital (acquired by Cisco for $590 million) and OpenTable (went public in May).

Benchmark still holds the record for (probably) the best venture investment in history - they turned a $6.7 million investment in eBay in 1997 into $5 billion by 1999. Partner Bill Gurley talks about that deal and Benchmark in general in our video interview with him last year.

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SpringSource, the maker of the open source application framework for Java, has acquired Hyperic, which provides open source software to manage web applications. Hyperic provides monitoring and management software for all types of web applications, whether hosted in the cloud or on premise. The acquisition lets SpringSource deepen its roots in the enterprise space by offering a comprehensive suite of products. SpringSource can now help IT operations build, run and manage Java applications, both in the cloud or in a data center.

SpringSource’s flasghip product, Spring, has become a popular programming model for developers to create enterprise Java applications. Spring promises faster project completion, improved portability and application quality. Hyperic is well known and established as the provider of an enterprise server monitoring solution used by companies such as CNet, Mosso, Hi5, Microsoft and others. The startup’s monitoring systems are used in co-location centers to monitor, manage and report on performance issues. Last year, Hyperic launched its new cloud service monitoring and logging service CloudStatus.com. CloudStatus is a free and publicly available website that allows developers and users of cloud services such as Amazon S3 and EC2 to monitor the the performance and uptime (or downtime) of these services.