It has been a busy year for VMware in terms of acquisitions. This followed an almost equally busy 2010, during which it bought both SpringSouce, incorporating its technology into vFabric, and Zimbra from Yahoo, which it has kept separate.

Most of the 2011 buys we have covered in various posts here, but a few escaped our attention. I thought it would be a nice year-end post to review where things stand with each technology. By comparison, Google this past year acquired more than two dozen companies.

• It started the year off buying NeoAccel, maker of SSL VPNs. The VPNs are no longer offered for sale, but you can bet this technology will be virtualized and incorporated into future offerings.
• In March it purchased of WaveMaker, open source graphical programming tools for non-developers to create Web apps. The tools are still available for downloading on the Wavemaker site here.
• In April it bought SlideRocket, an online presentation service, which is still available. There is a free plan and another for $24 per month per user, along with enterprise pricing.
• In May there was Shavlik Technologies, the two worked on GO and have taken Shavlik's management and security product and renamed it vCenter Protect Essentials Plus .
• Also in May there was Socialcast, the collaboration and social networking vendor, that is still going strong and updating its service offerings. Our article earlier this month about how one developer used the Socialcast APIs to develop new internal apps is worth reviewing.
• in June it bought Digital Fuel Technologies, which sells tools to measure infrastructure and apps costs, mainly for the financial services industry. Its offerings have been rebranded as IT Finance Manager, IT Service Level Manager, and IT Vendor Manager.
• Then in August it bought PacketMotion, maker of database and virtual machine activity monitoring. It announced end of life for these products a year from now.

Things have been quiet the rest of the year, although quite a few new products have been announced around the twin VMworlds for the fall. And Let's not forget that VMware is still a subsidiary of EMC, and this year saw EMC transfer the controlling assets of online backup vendor Mozy to VMware.

More details on support for these acquired products can be found here on VMware's site.