Sun Acquiring Outsourcing Vendor SevenSpace
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Sun Microsystems on Monday disclosed plans to acquire SevenSpace Inc., an Ashburn, Va.-based provider of IT outsourcing and managed services.
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Sun Microsystems will gain access to high end open source file system technology with its imminent purchase of Cluster File Systems Inc.
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Sun is expected Tuesday to ship xVM Ops Center, a datacenter automation console compatible with Linux- and Solaris-based x86 and Sparc environments.Ops Center&#39;s features include automatic installation of firmware and bare-metal operating systems; scanning and tracking of servers in a network; and patch-management tools for SUSE, Red Hat, and Solaris, according to a company statement.James Staten, an analyst with Forrester Research, said the last feature is particularly compelling, but not enough to attract a great deal of new business to Sun&#39;s platform.&quot;The patching mechanism they have is very impressive and works with both Linux and Solaris, but given that this is a 1.0 product the appeal will remain mainly with existing Sun customers,&quot; he said via e-mail Friday.&quot;It&#39;s a substantially better entry in systems management than their previous attempts, and much more open,&quot; he added.The Ops Center codebase has already been released under the open-source GPLv3 license and is available at www.openxVM.org.Sun previously said the first commercial version of Ops Center would be available on Jan. 8.Oren Teich, director of product management and marketing for xVM, said the company needed additional time to make some final tweaks and improvements in areas including firmware provisioning and reporting, following requests from early beta users.He disagreed with the notion that mainly existing Sun customers will buy the software, saying the company expects that sales will be split between current and new users. While it is a 1.0 release, code from two existing Sun products, N1 System Manager and Sun Connection, are running under the hood of Ops Center&#39;s GUI, he said. &quot;In some ways, this is a very mature project.&quot;Yet the first version has a key omission: support for Windows. &quot;Although Windows support is not currently available, we&#39;re committed to offering it in the future,&quot; Teich said.Sun is also developing xVM Server, a bare-metal, Xen-based hypervisor with support for Linux, Solaris and Windows guest operating systems.While Sun&#39;s xVM brand stands for &quot;the intersection of virtualization and management,&quot; according to Teich, the Ops Center 1.0 release does not feature a broad range of functionality around virtualization. This summer, Sun will release its hypervisor product and &quot;an update to Ops Center that will have a lot of virtualization capabilities on top of it,&quot; Teich said.The company will battle along with leader VMware, Oracle, Microsoft and an array of other vendors for a stake in the virtualization space, which analysts have pegged as remaining wide-open despite the voluminous hype around the topic in recent years.With Ops Center, Sun will go up against IT management powerhouses such as HP and IBM.Subscription pricing for Ops Center, with support and network-delivered services, ranges between $100 and $350 per managed server per year.
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International Business Machines Corp. said Monday it will provide voice and data services to British financial-services company Lloyds TSB Group PLC for seven years in a deal worth &#36;971.6 million.
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PalmSource surprised the mobile vendor community today with the announcement that it will acquire China MobileSoft (CMS), ostensibly to leverage that company's expertise in building a mobile version of the Linux operating system.
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Ziff Davis - In another blow to Microsoft, a government agency in New South Wales, Australia, signs a deal with Sun to migrate 1,500 users to the company's StarOffice productivity suite and Messaging products.
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Sun Microsystems has entered into an agreement to acquire SevenSpace, a privately-held company based in Ashburn, Va. SevenSpace will broaden Sun&#39;s Managed Services offerings to include heterogeneous environments
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Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) announced the availability of two upgrades to its software development platforms on Tuesday. Java Studio Enterprise (JSE) 7, the Santa Clara, Calif.
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IBM Corp. said Monday it has won a $1.4 billion outsourcing contract from AstraZeneca PLC, a seven-year deal aimed at helping the British pharmaceutical company manage its internal technology operations.
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Almost lost in the clamor over Sun's expanded partnership with Microsoft on Wednesday was a small acquisition that will bolster Sun's HPC storage offerings. Sun agreed to acquire a majority of the assets of Cluster File Systems.
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Sun announced Tuesday that it is buying Innotek, maker of VirtualBox, virtualization software that may have more value for software developers than datacenter administrators.Steve Wilson, vice president of&#160;Sun&#39;s nascent xVM virtualization line, called the purchase a &quot;huge deal&quot; for xVM and &quot;even Sun as a whole,&quot; on his official blog Tuesday. Terms of the deal to buy the German company, expected to close in Sun&#39;s fiscal third quarter, were not disclosed.&quot;VirtualBox is software designed to allow users to run multiple operating systems on top of whatever OS they currently have installed,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Whether you choose Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris as your default desktop of choice, VirtualBox will ride on top of it and allow you to &#39;host&#39; any arbitrary collection of operating system instances. Software developers everywhere are starting to discover this way of operating, and these desktop virtualization solutions are quickly becoming part of the common developer toolkit.&quot;&quot;While there are other applications that provide this capability, VirtualBox is free, open source, and supports a wide range of operating systems,&quot; Wilson added. The software has been downloaded more than 4 million times since it was released roughly one year ago, according to Sun.VirtualBox may sound similar to Sun&#39;s own xVM Server, but the two products are targeted at different markets, Wilson said. xVM Server, announced in November, is a hypervisor that installs on top of the hardware. &quot;It&#39;s a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. ... This is datacenter grade virtualization,&quot; he said.In comparison, VirtualBox is &quot;a software developer&#39;s dream,&quot; he said. &quot;You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multitier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box. ... Where xVM Server is competitive with something like VMware ESX Server, VirtualBox is more like VMware Workstation/Fusion or Parallels Desktop.&quot;The product will continue to be free, and for strategic reasons, according to Wilson. &quot;The developers that build applications have a huge amount of influence on how they&#39;re deployed. We believe that developers using VirtualBox can help guide their friends in the data center towards xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine,&quot; he said.Sun may also look to align VirtualBox with its other developer-oriented assets, such as NetBeans and Glassfish, he said.&quot;Having a virtual lab story -- assuming it works and developers and QA like it -- is good for a developer-friendly company like Sun,&quot; said Michael Cot&#233;, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;But I&#39;m not familiar with VirtualBox, so I don&#39;t know if it in particular is good or bad.&quot;Programmers who aren&#39;t using virtualization now ought to start, Cot&#233; said. &quot;You&#39;d have to be one of those self-flagellation types to not want virtual labs in your developer tool-chains,&quot; he said. &quot;Maintaining a bunch of physical machines is tedious. If I&#39;m a developer and I have to write software that runs on four different platforms, spread out over however many different versions of Windows, Linux distros, OS X, et cetera, all of those machines add up. And then creating &#39;fresh installs&#39; of them for testing gets worse.&quot;
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Identity and access managed Sun Microsystems has become the latest infrastructure provider to express its love for smaller software partners in the form of an acquisition.â¦
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Sun Microsystems is buying IT services company SevenSpace for an undisclosed amount of cash, helping to expand its support for operating systems outside of Solaris.
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IBM has signed a seven-year IT outsourcing deal with Dun & Bradstreet under which it will transform and manage key business functions and financial operations for the company.
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Despite having revenues of around $70 million to $85 million, MySQL commanded an impressive $1 billion price tag in today's acquisition by database giant Sun.
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US-based software developer PalmSource Inc. said Wednesday it had entered agreement to acquire China MobileSoft Ltd. in a bid to extend its market as a software provider for cell phones and mobile devices.
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(InfoWorld) - IT distributor Agilysys Inc. continued its strategy of growing by acquisition, announcing plans to buy Innovativ Systems Design Inc., a major U.S. reseller of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s servers and storage products. It's the third purchase in six months for Agilysys, whose ultimate goal is to double in size to become a US$1 billion business within two years. Agilysys will pay US$100 million in cash for Innovativ. The deal, announced Friday, also includes a provision for the vendor to make an extra maximum payment of $90 million provided the Innovativ business achieves specific financial targets in the first two years after purchase. Agilysys hopes to close the acquisition on or around July 1. With headquarters in Edison, New Jersey, Innovativ is a systems integrator and reseller of servers, enterprise storage management and services, with a particular emphasis on the financial services and telecommunications industries. "The acquisition of Innovativ will establish a new and significant relationship between Sun and Agilysys," Arthur Rhein, Agilysys chairman, CEO and president, said in a release. He noted that the company already resells products from Sun's storage rivals EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. and its server competitors HP and IBM. Once the deal is complete, the firm will establish a new Agilysys Sun technology solutions business unit to be headed by Innovativ's current CEO Tony Mellina. In recent months, Agilysys has bought Visual One Systems, a developer and seller of Windows-based software for the hospitality industry, and Stack Computer, a technology integrator that focuses on high-availability storage from EMC and customers in the health-care, financial services and manufacturing industries. At the same time, Agilysys divested itself of its KeyLink systems distribution business assets to Arrow Electronics Inc. in March for $485 million in cash. The offloading of the KeyLink operation is in line with Agilysys' aim to concentrate exclusively on selling technology directly to corporate and public-sector customers. Factoring in the acquisitions of both Stack and Innovativ, Agilysys will expand annual revenue to over $800 million, on its way to becoming a $1 billion operation in 2009 and a $1.5 billion business come 2010. Â