Sun Acquires Virtualbox Vendor Innotek

According to a recent press announcement, Sun Microsystems has submitted a takeover bid to Innotek shareholders; the price was not disclosed. The young, German enterprise impressed its purchaser with figures of more than four million downloads since it released its code in January 2007. Virtualbox is to become part of Sun’s virtualization strategy, which the enterprise announced in November 2007 under the Sun xVM caption. "VirtualBox provides Sun with the perfect complement to our recently announced Sun xVM Server product" said Rich Green, Vice President Sun Software, and added: "and will align perfectly with Sun's other developer focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon MySQL." He sees Sun’s xVM server at the core of the data center and Virtualbox as the perfect match for any laptop or desktop. Sun xVM is based on the free Xen virtualization technology which Sun customizes and optimizes for its own applications.

Details of the acquisition and the price have not been disclosed, however, the press release does reveal that the transaction will not impact Sun’s profit per share. The deal is scheduled for completion in the third quarter of the 2008 fiscal year, which would be late March.

After MySQL, Innotek is the second Open Source company on Sun’s shopping list in recent weeks. January 16 Sun announced the acquisition of the company behind the MySQL Open Source database at a price of one billion dollars.

Virtualbox weighs in at less than 20MB and can be downloaded from the project website. The guest operating system supported by Virtualbox include Windows 3.1 through Vista, Linux Kernel 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6, Solaris x86, OS/2, Netware and DOS.