SUN to buy VirtualBox
Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek, Expanding Sun xVM Reach to the Developer Desktop
SANTA CLARA, CA February 12, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market. This software is available for all major operating systems at www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org.
Wow! Sun is really moving. This acquisition expands their ability to get into enterprises with OSS on the desktop as well as in the data centre.
VirtualBox is a really great virtualisation engine which sits very well on top of my Linux desktops and servers. For example, it enables us to run the dreaded Windows inside a secure cage on our safe and sound Linux infrastructure. For when we need to do integration testing or migration development.
With SUN buying MySQL, and now Innotek they are moving horizontally across the enterprise, gaining more traction where M$ is currently king…
Think about it. Sun now have,
- Operating System (Open Solaris, or they could chose to support any of the Linux flavours out there too)
- OpenOffice.org desktop application suite that is gaining traction very fast world-wide
- One of the world’s most popular database engines used to power much of the web and beyond
- Cross platform virtualisation technology enabling almost any OS to any OS integration
What else do you think they might go for? Alfresco maybe? Or OpenBravo?…
I do believe there is a real strategy here… Are Sun aggressively going after M$, rather than simply being content to sit in the data centre? You bet they are.
Watch this space… The world is a-changing.
Tags: Open Source, Sun, VirtualBox
