I had a great conversation with Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource last week. As readers of TSS will know, news of SpringSource acquiring Covalent caused much buzz amongst notary middleware personalities.

Rod explained that acquiring Covalent provides SpringSource with contributors on several Apache projects including Apache Tomcat. Why is Tomcat important? Well, more than a third of Spring users run SpringSource products on Tomcat. Tomcat use is also relatively high for paying customers of SpringSource support. The Covalent deal helps SpringSource offer customers a joint Tomcat and Spring support offering from one vendor. Rod states:
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