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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Acquisitions

The 451 Group Snaps Up Research Firm Moss Creek Capital

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The 451 Group has acquired independent equity-research firm Moss Creek Capital in order to expand its services for the professional investment community. Dallas-based Moss Creek provides investment research on publicly traded software companies, offering actionable insight gleaned from conversations with end users, key players in the software distribution channel and company executives. Moss Creek principal Gregg Speicher will remain with the acquired firm.

The acquisition expands the coverage and financial expertise of The 451 Group, an independent analyst firm that covers emerging technologies within the enterprise IT industry.

“The addition of Moss Creek will accelerate our efforts to explain to investors how disruptive technologies will affect large and small public companies,” said Martin V. McCarthy, CEO of The 451 Group. “With major forces such as cloud computing gathering on the horizon, we believe that investors are hungry for deep insight into which companies are going to be winners and losers in the resulting market. We will continue to look for opportunities to expand our firm, and we expect to complete additional acquisitions this year.”

Oracle To Buy Virtual Iron?

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The rumour is spreading , but so far no official feedback from Oracle.

Local Techwire reports that there are talks between Oracle and Virtual Iron ongoing and that Oracle is aiming at Virtual Iron to expand its server virtualization management platform.

According to Local Techwire Katherine Egbert, a Jefferies & Company analyst who closely follows Red Hat, say that

It’s likely Oracle would buy Virtual Iron to improve its prospects in the rapidly growing server virtualization management market and to keep Virtual Iron technology out of competitive hands,

and note that Virtual Iron is the “fifth-largest server virtualization vendor.”

She also noted that Virtual Iron’s technology is “complementary to Oracle Virtual Machine” while also cheaper than market leader VMware.

Virtual Iron, according to TechVibes founded in 2003 , already has a questionable Virtualization History, as I wrote earlier in Open Source Virtualization Today , Virtual Iron initially had a Single Server Image implementation they sold under the Virtual Iron VFe productname , but somewhere in 2005 they changed gears and became the supplier of a server virtualization & virtual infrastructure management solution , a Virtualization Solution based on Open Source Technologies, or back then a Xen Management Solution.

Fact is that when RedHat moves towards KVM , it leaves a gap to fill for Oracle which with OracleVM today is putting it’s eggs in the Xen basket. Oracle just hosted the Xen Summit and has Wim Coekaerts on the Xen Advisory Board. So adding a company like Virtual Iron to it’s portofolio to manage those Xen based VM’s absolutely makes sense.

If or when that will happen is still the question 🙂

But we’ll keep you posted..

EMC/VMW Acquisition By Cisco Imminent?

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Great field work on Virtualization.info today about the fact that investors are buying heaps of VMware stock, signalling that something is up.

A small excerpt:

Monday’s SEC filings shows that Cisco posted a prospectus on raising $4 billion in senior bonds. The book building is run by all the major investment banks and is closing on February 17.
Cisco must be really confident for such a major issuance in these market conditions, but Standard & Poors is giving the senior unsecured notes an A+ rating with a stable outlook.
Cisco will use $500 million of the $4 billion to repay short term debt.  When combined with sizeable cash holdings, this leaves them with with $4.7 billion in cash at the US parent company. According to CNET that amount excluded cash holdings at subsidiaries overseas.

CBTS Buys Virtual Blocks

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CBTS, the technology solutions division of Cincinnati Bell, today announced the acquisition of Toronto-based Virtual Blocks, a division of Commerx Computer Systems.

According to the release, the acquisition will strengthen CBTS’ leading-edge data center solutions for businesses of all sizes and provide a foundation for continued geographic expansion.

The CBTS Virtual Data Center is a utility computing service that allows customers to provision and manage virtual servers in a secure cloud computing environment. Some common uses for the Virtual Data Center include cost-effective virtualized disaster recovery solutions; rapidly deployed test/development environments; on-demand server capacity with utility billing; and managed services including Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint hosting.

Virtual Blocks’ product portfolio includes the Virtual Server Grid (VSG) for service providers and large IT organizations and the Virtual In-a-Box Environment (VIBE) for small to medium-sized business customers. The VSG is installed at CBTS and Bell Canada, and the VIBE is distributed across North America by Arrow and Synnex resellers.

The acquisition of Virtual Blocks closed on Jan. 30, 2009.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Quest Buys MonoSphere

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Quest Software has acquired the technology assets of MonoSphere, a privately owned company headquartered in Redwood City, CA. MonoSphere is the creator of Storage Horizon storage capacity management software.

Quest has also hired a substantial number of the former MonoSphere employees.

  • Quest will continue to maintain, enhance, and support the Storage Horizon solution, enabling customers to dramatically increase utilization of storage infrastructure, resulting in significant reductions in storage capital spending.
  • Quest will also integrate Storage Horizon with a number of its existing products, expanding Quest’s leadership in providing complete solutions that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases, Windows infrastructure and virtual environments.

Sun Microsystems Acquires Q-layer To Expand Cloud Offerings

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Sun Microsystems just announced it has acquired Q-layer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. The 35 people from the Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, will become part of Sun’s Cloud Computing business unit, which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

With this acquisition Sun logically expands its existing cloud building blocks on top of its xVM Virtualization product range. Let’s not forget Sun already bought MySQL and VirtualBox to that effect last year. Sun keeps doing many cool things with technology, but seems to have a persistent problem to generate meaningful revenue from those acquisitions and development. We are curious to see if time will prove their puzzle just took a bit longer to fall together.

The Sun press release goes on to claim the acquired ‘Q-layer technology simplifies cloud management and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun’s strategy to enable building public and private clouds. As businesses continue to rely more on technology to drive mission-critical processes, the agility of the datacenter determines the flexibility of the entire company. The Q-layer software supports instant provisioning of services such as servers, storage, bandwidth and applications, enabling users to scale their own environments to meet their specific requirements.’

“Sun’s open, network-centric approach coupled with optimized systems, software and services provides the critical building blocks for private and public cloud offerings,” said David Douglas, senior vice president of Cloud Computing and chief sustainability officer, Sun Microsystems. “Q-layer’s technology and expertise will enhance Sun’s offerings, simplifying cloud management and speeding application deployment.”

The terms of the deal were not disclosed as the transaction is not material to Sun.

Disclaimer: Q-Layer is the longest running sponsor of Virtualization.com