So last week's Oracle announcement on Java virtualization has just been seriously eclipsed by a big joint announcement from VMware and Salesforce.com, centered on VMware's recently acquired SpringSource division. All of these groups are going to be mashed together into one offering, called VMforce; if you want the usual hilariously opaque diagram explaining it, check out this one from SpringSource. The upshot, basically, is that Spring tc server will be running, via VMware's virtualization software, on Force.com, Salesforce.com's cloud platform (side note: didn't we stop putting ".com" at the end of product and company names in 2001 or thereabouts?). As Johnston puts it on his blog, "the developer [can] interact with the server in the way they would with a local tc Server or Tomcat instance." Mitch Ferguson, senior director of alliances at VMware, said "The Java developer downloads [the WAR file] into VMforce, and we handle everything from there."

Tony Baer from Ovum has a pretty good wrap-up of the industry politics of this -- it's an audacious jump to get Salesforce.com away from its ERP roots and into the general-interest cloud territory being staked out by Google and Amazon. What's interesting to me is that the path to that victory is Java. As I discussed a bit last week, Java is actually kind of a natural for virtualization and cloud architectures -- after all, it's already a virtualized platform (that's the V in JVM). And, as much of the press around this move has indicated, Java's six million developers give the VMforce offering instant credibility and a built-in market. We'll see how exactly that market makes anybody any money when the thing actually becomes available later this year.