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.

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The title says it all really

SANTA CLARA, CA January 16, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun’s position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today’s announcement reaffirms Sun’s position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

Wow. That really makes sense for Sun and makes the chaps from MySQL nicely rich!

Sun have already shown themselves to be pretty into the Open Source thing. In the last couple of years they have Open Sourced Java and Solaris. Two of their biggest software platforms. I recall Jonathan Schwartz saying how, after giving away the software for free they made more money from it… That makes perfect sense to me, but it doesn’t seem to work for Microsoft yet.

Cool

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One of my current favourite blogs is “The Open Road” by Matt Assay. A prolific commentator, well known in the Open Source industry and employed by Alfresco to boot (although the amount he writes on his blog I’m surprised he has time for much else).

Anyway, he recently did a series of interviews with many individuals that are at the heart of the Open Source phenomenon, from Red Hat, through Novell, IBM and many others. Amongst all of them Matt’s recent interview with Jonathan Schwartz (CEO Sun Microsystems) was absolutely fascinating and really did stand out from the crowd.

Jonathan is no ivory tower CEO - his own blog at Sun is a very good read and includes the now famous invitation to Linus Torvalds to come round for dinner: “I’ll cook, you bring the wine”. [I wonder if they ever did get together?]

The interview Matt presents here shows Jonathan Schwartz having the kind of insightful thinking and clarity of vision that make many other executives’ ramblings thoroughly insignificant. Matt concludes:

Fascinating, fascinating stuff. Sun is a contender again, and largely because of the vision and tenacity of Jonathan Schwartz.

And here’s a taster from Jonathan:

In a year where Sun arguably moved more aggressively to give away more free software than any other company, we grew our software business by 13%. It was the fastest-growing business at Sun (and doesn’t even include Solaris, which we don’t yet break out). We pumped out more software last year than we have in the history of the company. We gave it away. And yet our software business grew by 13%.

Read Matt’s article to find out why and how Sun is rising. If you are at all interested in Open Source and also how to make money from it, this is one of the most clearly articulated examples I have ever read. Nice one Matt. That’s a real gem.

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