[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.

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.

[citation needed] After spending millions on development with no result, it was subsequently donated to the Eclipse Foundation as the Virgo project.

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).

In April 2013, VMware, along with its parent company EMC Corporation, formally created a joint venture (with GE) called Pivotal Software.