IBM – latoga labs

I have been hearing rumblings lately that IBM has stopped direct sales of the Transitive Solaris SPARC Binary Translator solution the purchased late last year. (see IBM Virtualizes Sun Out of Market). This is a rather curious move. While it sounds like it was the OEM division of IBM that drove the acquisition of Transitive (IBM OEM’d the product), it is strange that people who want to spend money on the solution are being turned away.

I tried to find which product within IBM’s vast portfolio of products included the Transitive solution, but I wasn’t able to. I’m assuming that their own OEM’s version is still available to customers, but I’m also assuming that it’s not a straight OEM but embedded in some larger solution and thus has a higher price point that the Transitive stand-alone solution.

I was really expecting IBM to leverage this aquisition to help put a stake in Sun’s heart. Maybe they are being a bit more stealthy in their attack and are going to leverage the binary translation technology to go after more than just Sun…time will tell.

Until then, customers who wanted to leverage Transitive to quickly get rid of their SPARC servers will have to take the long road.

A few days ago IBM Announced Plans to Acquire Transitive. I wrote about Transitive’s Solaris Application virtualization technology recently, it is a wonderful way for companies to maintain their investment in Solaris based applications while minimizing their dependency (risk) upon Sun.

IBM’s purchase of Transitive is a brilliant strategic way to further minimize a competitor in the market while not forcing a painful forklift upgrade upon the customer base. “Sure, we’ll sell you new IBM X86 based hardware, and then we’ll simply continue to run all your Solaris apps within the Transitive virtaulized wrapper. Upgrade those applications at your leisure when (and if) it makes sense.”

Virtualization continues to be a game changer in more ways than originally expected.