IBM is to to buy Transitive in an acquisition intended to help its customers cut costs.
Once the deal is completed, IBM is expected to move the virtualization software company’s California personnel to one of IBM’s local sites.
Research and development staff located in Manchester, UK, will remain at their current facilities.
IBM has been using Transitive’s technology in its IBM PowerVMTM software, which consolidates customers’ Linux workloads onto IBM systems, since January .
Transitive has sold more than 10 million copies of its cross-platform virtualization technology and has 48 patents.
Its product, QuickTransit, allows software applications that have been compiled for one operating system run on systems with different processors or operating systems without modifications.
Transitive’s technology is based on research developed at Manchester University in 1992. The company was founded five years later by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer-science lecturer, and a team of his graduate students to bring QuickTransit to market.
In 2005 the company signed Apple as its first major customer.
Apple and Silicon Graphics, along with IBM, are Transitive’s OEM customers. The company has been providing QuickTransit technology to run Apple’s Rosetta translation software and the product is shipped on all of Apple’s Intel-based computers.
No price has been released for the purchase.
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