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Acquisitions

KACE Buys Into App Virtualization Market With Computers In Motion Acquisition

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KACE (previous coverage), the systems management appliance company, Tuesday announced its entry into the application virtualization market with its acquisition of Computers in Motion. Financial details of the acquisition are not being disclosed. The company intends to release products around this acquisition by year-end.

Established in 2001, Austin-based Computers in Motion provides technology focused on making applications easy to distribute and secure through application virtualization technologies. With this acquisition, KACE plans to revolutionize the application virtualization market by extending the benefits of virtualization to other desktop management areas such as application security and data management. The technology and development staff of the Computers in Motion team will form the foundation of KACE’s application virtualization products.

A preview of KACE Virtual Kontainers will be offered at KACE’s booth at the upcoming VMworld Conference in Las Vegas.

The Computers in Motion acquisition fits in squarely with KACE’s strategy of lowering the total cost of ownership for IT organizations through its appliance-based systems management and virtualization technology. This acquisition also builds on the product momentum KACE has made throughout the year in the virtualization market, including the recent launches of the Virtual KBOX Systems Management and KBOX Virtual Remote Appliances offerings.

KACE

RedHat Picks Up Qumranet

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According to Globes, RedHat has acquired Qumranet (confirmed via press release)

“Redhat announced its acquisition of Israeli virtualization start-up Qumranet Inc. for about $100 million, ending a long period of rumors. This is Red Hat’s first acquisition in Israel, and it will turn the Linux software company into a market leader in virtualization. Qumranet will become Red Hat’s R&D center in Israel.”

Best known Qumranet co-founders are Benny Schnaider, Moshe Bar, Both are well known, with track records ath Cisco ,PentaCom and P-Cube, and more interesting Qlusters and XenSource (now Citrix)

“Benny Schaider, and Moshe Bar are expected to head Red Hat’s Israeli R&D after the acquisition. Qumranet has 65 employees worldwide, mostly R&D staff in Israel. The company has raised $20 million in two financing rounds from its founders, Sequoia Capital, Northwest Venture Partners, and Cisco. The company still has cash from its latest financing round, which was held in January. ”

This shines a totally different light on the irrational discussion if RedHat should be Acquired by VMWare .

RedHat now owns one of the fastest growing Virtualization technologies around : KVM
RedHat had already chosen for stronger support of KVM, but with todays evolution one has to start thinking about the future of Xen in the leading Linux distribution. In one day RedHat stepped from being just an integrator of different virtualization technologies to one of the leading Virtualization Vendors.

What’s All This Talk About VMware Buying Red Hat?

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We were looking at the swirling rumors coming in about a potential acquisition of Red Hat by VMware, and ultimately decided not to cover the rumor because … well because it seems so irrational.

But is that actually so?

This is what BusinessWeek wrote:

Speculation is rife that the company (Red Hat) is a takeover target. “It makes no sense that they’re still hanging out there,” says Eric Gebaide, a managing director at investment bank Innovation Advisors.

One possible suitor is virtualization software company VMware, which some industry executives says is on the lookout for an operating system to add to its portfolio. Former VMware CEO Diane Greene, ousted by her board in July, had set up meetings with Red Hat in part to position VMware as friendly to open source and possibly as a prelude to a buyout discussion, according to a person familiar with the conversations. Representatives of both companies declined to comment.

Ostatic followed up with a snapshot analysis, and now the folks over at Cnet News.com are trying to make sense of such an acquisition.

Ostatic concludes in its post:

A combination of VMware virtualization and a proven, popular operating system could pave the way for a future of healthy competition for VMware with other operating systems that bundle virtualization. I wouldn’t be surprised to see both VMware and Red Hat pursue all of this.

Meanwhile Cnet’s Matt Asay contradicts:

I would think this trend cuts the other way. Red Hat (and Novell) likely see virtualization’s commoditization as a reason to push the knife deeper into VMware. Being acquired by an important but commoditized feature of their operating systems doesn’t sound appealing to me…

What do you think?

VMware

Red Hat

Symantec Acquires nSuite Technologies, Moves Into Endpoint Virtualization Management

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NetworkWorld is reporting that Symantec has agreed to acquire nSuite Technologies, a small firm specializing in virtualization solutions for the healthcare industry, for an undisclosed amount in cash. Symantec aims to build out its portfolio of virtualization security and management technologies.

nSuite makes software called PrivacyShell Virtual Workspace Management, which is primarily used by hospitals for secure desktop management on behalf of physicians and medical staff. The nSuite software works to create a container around an individual’s authorized applications and data. When a user is authenticated, the user’s applications and data can quickly be ported to the Windows-based desktop where the individual is working, and later removed. PrivacyShell Virtual Workspace Management balances centralized control with the flexibility needed to provide tailored user environments. It leverages virtualization and authentication technologies to optimize the way hospitals deliver and manage end user workspaces.

After the nSuite acquisition is completed, which is expected this month, Symantec anticipates integrating the nSuite software with its Altiris SVS and AppStream management consoles in the future. It will announce product updates at ManageFusion, a hands-on lab and training event held in various cities worldwide.

nSuite Technologies

There We Go Again: EMC Shares Rise On Acquisition Rumors

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This is one rumor that just keeps coming back: Reuters is reporting that EMC shares rose as much as 6.3 percent yesterday on market speculation that the world’s largest maker of corporate storage equipment could be acquired. The company stills holds a majority stake in virtualization juggernaut VMware.

Shares of EMC rose as high as $14.92 in trade on the New York Stock Exchange, before retreating to $14.75 in afternoon trading.

EMC spokesman Dave Farmer declined to comment, saying the company never responds to market rumors or speculation. Pacific Growth Equities analyst Kaushik Roy said the most likely company to be interested in buying EMC would be Cisco Systems. Last May, we reported on rumors of a possible merger.

A popular phrase says there is fire where there is smoke, but we’re getting a bit skeptical. These rumors have been floating for years now, and although a Cisco-EMC combo would seem like a pretty logical combination, you can ask yourself if it why a deal would be in the works now, when a merger or full acquisition should have already happened if both companies and their shareholders agreed.

EMC Corporation

Cisco Systems

Double-Take Software Picks Up emBoot for $10 Million in Cash

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Double-Take Software announced (PDF) today the acquisition of emBoot, experts in network booting technology. emBoot network boot technologies allow organizations to easily assign and re-assign computing workloads to any available Windows or Linux physical servers or desktops or any virtual machine in their environment.

The acquisition follows Double-Take Software’s development of full system protection and recovery technologies as well as the acquisition of CDP recovery with TimeData as key components of the company’s Dynamic Infrastructure Strategy that aims to optimize, protect, monitor and recover workloads on any resource, anywhere and to any point in time.

The technology acquired with emBoot allows separation of the operating system, applications and data associated with a workload from the hardware it runs on. IT organizations can now move those workloads around in a matter of minutes whether it is because a disaster has occurred, a data center is moving, the company has decided to virtualize its infrastructure or an application needs more capacity.

Moving entire workloads around independent of the underlying physical or virtual hardware they are running on has been painfully complex and time consuming for IT administrators. By storing workloads on networked storage resources and making them available to physical and virtual servers on-demand, Double-Take’s new solutions now make it is easy for IT administrators to move critical applications and data according to their value and desired service level agreements and to optimize the use of test, production and disaster recovery computing resources.

emBoot’s technology is based on the growing iSCSI storage standard (Internet Small Computer System Interface). Double-Take’s new offering will provide two key capabilities for customers in support of movement to a more dynamic IT infrastructures:

  • Using any iSCSI compliant storage solution, those customers will be able to create bootable images of their production workloads and use a centralized workload management console to assign those workloads to any available physical or virtual machines in their environment.
  • Optionally, companies will be able to build a software-based iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN) using standard server hardware and storage using included iSCSI Target software.

IT professionals will be able to quickly create an IP SAN in minutes using commodity server hardware and disks they may already have. The iSCSI-based network booting features will make it easy to migrate workloads to new hardware, to virtual machines or back based on changing demands.

The company acquired emBoot for a total cash purchase price of $10 million.

Double-Take Software

[Source: Hypervoria]