IBM buying Apple's virtualisation partner
By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 20 November 2008 02:47
The company offers off-the-shelf products allowing programs written for Solaris on SPARC to run on Linux on x86-64 or Itanium based hardware, or Solaris on x86-64.
It also has an OEM business that helps companies take their software to a wider range of platforms without a coding effort, or to bring a wider range of software to a platform.
One of the best known uses of Transitive's software is Apple's Rosetta, which allows programs written for the PowerPC version of Mac OS X to run on newer Intel-based Macs.
IBM has also been an OEM customer of Transitive, with the latter's technology being incorporated in PowerVM, software that allows Linux on x86 applications to be consolidated on IBM mainframe or Power-based systems.
"This acquisition is part of IBM's strategy to help clients optimize the efficiency and productivity of their computing infrastructure and improve the utilization of the servers that run them," said IBM officials.
Since Transitive is a privately owned company, no financial details of the proposed transaction have been revealed.
Although Transitive's headquarters are in California, the research and development team is in Manchester, UK. The company's technology originated at Manchester University.
Founder and chief technology officer Alasdair Rawsthorne and VP of engineering operations Martyn Spink are both former employees of the university, while vice president of worldwide engineering Henry Nash was co-founder of Insignia Solutions, which created the SoftPC emulation software.
The company's vice president of marketing is former Australian IT journalist Ian Robinson.
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