Rabbit Technologies Acquisition FAQ

1. What is being announced?

SpringSource, a division of VMware, has acquired Rabbit Technologies Ltd., a UK based software company that is the primary sponsor of the open source messaging system, RabbitMQ. The deal includes all substantial assets and employees of Rabbit Technologies Ltd, but detailed terms of the deal are not disclosed.

2. What is RabbitMQ?

RabbitMQ is a complete and highly reliable, open source, enterprise messaging system that is based on the open standard, AMQP. It offers exceptional reliability, availability and scalability along with throughput and latency performance that is predictable and consistent. Its compact and lean architecture makes it ideal for use in cloud computing environments where developers are designing tomorrow’s distributed, loosely coupled, highly scalable advanced applications.

For more information about RabbitMQ please see the RabbitMQ Get Started Guide.

3. Why is SpringSource acquiring RabbitMQ?

SpringSource and VMware’s goal is to remove complexity from IT. We will achieve this goal by creating productive programming models, compelling cloud services and integrated application stacks that enable our customers to focus on their applications and not the underlying IT infrastructure. RabbitMQ is an essential application infrastructure layer used in both the private and public cloud. For example, Heroku and other cloud providers use RabbitMQ as their message broker. By employing the technical thought leaders that build and support RabbitMQ, SpringSource will be able to ensure that the open source project continues to deliver a complete and highly reliable messaging system ideally suited for private and public cloud architectures.

4. What does this mean for the Spring Community?

Enterprise developers that use Spring and Grails can expect a first class integration with RabbitMQ as a messaging system. This will provide developers with even more flexibility and choice in how to structure their applications while providing assurance that the applications they develop can more easily move from the developer desktop, to the virtualized datacenter and into the cloud.

5. What does this mean for SpringSource customers?

RabbitMQ extends our open source community and will be included as one of the many open source technologies officially supported by SpringSource. Since RabbitMQ provides an essential application infrastructure layer for modern applications, it will become an integral part of private and public cloud offerings that SpringSource and VMware expect to bring to market in the future.

6. What does this mean for the RabbitMQ community?

RabbitMQ will continue to be open source and distributed in the same way as before. The RabbitMQ community can expect to see increased investment in this outstanding technology which should result in significant improvements to the open source release. SpringSource, both as an independent entity and as a division of VMware, has always been a successful open source company that understands the needs of the community. The RabbitMQ community can expect to see the same dedication and support that SpringSource gives to its other open source communities like Spring, Grails, Groovy and Apache based technologies.

7. What does this mean for RabbitMQ customers?

All existing RabbitMQ customer contracts will be honored in full. RabbitMQ customers requiring new work or renewing subscriptions will be transitioned to VMware contracts at the time the new work is ordered. Rabbit customers should see an increase in availability of training, professional services and support offerings as the RabbitMQ business is integrated in SpringSource.

8. Does this mean SpringSource will stop supporting other message brokers?

SpringSource customers use a wide range of messaging solutions within their applications today and we will continue to support our customers in the use of those technologies. For example, SpringSource has many customers who rely on us for Apache ActiveMQ support. Those customers will continue to see the same commitment and level of support for ActiveMQ that they currently enjoy today. Adding RabbitMQ into our open source community enables us to provide more choice to our customers as they build modern applications for private and public cloud deployment.

9. What is AMQP?

The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for Message Oriented Middleware. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-subscribe), reliability and security. AMQP mandates the behavior of the messaging provider and client to the extent that implementations from different vendors are truly interoperable. AMQP is a wire-level protocol that provides a description of the format of the data that is sent across the network. Consequently any tool that can create and interpret messages that conform to this data format can interoperate with any other compliant tool irrespective of implementation language. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMQP)