Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek By VSM News Staff published: Tuesday, February 12 2008
Free and Open Source VirtualBox Desktop Virtualization Available for
All Major Operating Systems at www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. - 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.
With over four million downloads since January 2007, innotek’s open
source VirtualBox product has been quickly established as one of the
leading developer desktop virtualization platforms. Now, as part of the
Sun xVM portfolio, VirtualBox will have the support of Sun’s global
development community, field resources and partners to make VirtualBox
even more compelling to developers and end users, driving greater
adoption across a broad set of communities. VirtualBox enables desktop
or laptop PCs running the Windows, Linux, Mac or Solaris operating
systems to run multiple, different operating systems side-by-side,
switching between them with just a click of the mouse. This allows
software developers to more easily build multi-tier or cross-platform
applications, or power-users to take advantage of applications that may
not be available for their base operating system of choice.
"VirtualBox provides Sun with the perfect complement to our recently
announced Sun xVM Server product," said Rich Green, executive vice
president, Sun Software. “Where Sun xVM Server is designed to enable
dynamic IT at the heart of the datacenter, VirtualBox is ideal for any
laptop or desktop environment and will align perfectly with Sun’s other
developer focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and
soon MySQL as well as a wide range of community open source projects,
enabling developers to quickly develop, test and deploy the next
generation of applications."
VirtualBox is open source, and can be freely downloaded without the
hassle of payment or frustrating license keys at virtualbox.org or
openxvm.org. The download is less than 20 megabytes and the software is
easily installed on any modern, x86 architecture laptop or desktop
system running Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris operating systems, in
just minutes. Supported guest operating systems include all versions of
Windows from 3.1 to Vista, Linux 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, Solaris x86,
OS/2, Netware and DOS.
The Sun xVM family of products uniquely integrates virtualization and
management to help customers better manage both physical and virtualized
assets across heterogeneous environments. Previously announced products
in the Sun xVM line include Sun xVM Server and Sun xVM OpsCenter. Sun
xVM Server is a datacenter grade, bare-metal virtualization engine with
advanced features such as live VM migration and dynamic self-healing,
and can consolidate Windows, Linux and Solaris operating system
instances. Sun xVM Ops Center is a unified management infrastructure for
both physical and virtual assets in the datacenter. Sun has announced
partnerships and endorsements for xVM with Microsoft, RedHat, Intel,
AMD, Symantec and Quest Software. More information about Sun xVM
solutions can be found at: http://www.sun.com/xvm.
The agreement to acquire innotek follows Sun's announcement on January
16 of a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL, the world's most popular
open source database. These acquisitions reaffirm Sun as the largest
commercial open source contributor.
The stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek is subject to customary
closing conditions and is expected to be completed during the third
quarter of Sun's 2008 fiscal year. The terms of the deal were not
disclosed as the transaction is not material to Sun's earnings per share.
About innotek
innotek is an internally funded software company located in Stuttgart,
Germany with offices in Dresden, Berlin and the Russian Federation. Its
team of international specialists has focused entirely on the
development of high-tech system software. innotek has been at the
forefront of PC virtualization technology since 2001 and now staffs
Europe's largest and most experienced team of PC software virtualization
experts with numerous Fortune 500 and government customers.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global
marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the Computer (TM) " -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation,
community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in
more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com
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