Red Hat on Thursday announced the acquisition of Qumranet, paying about $107 million in cash for the privately held company.
Qumranet is a virtualization company that is best known for its KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In combination, these two Qumranet products offer a virtualization platform for enterprise customers.
Red Hat will also pick up Qumranet’s talent. The company’s team of professionals that develop, test and support Qumranet solutions, as well as leaders of the open-source community KVM project, will join Red Hat.
“Red Hat customers enjoy highly responsive, flexible and cost-effective IT infrastructures,” said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat. “This acquisition furthers our capability to widen the gap between open source and proprietary infrastructure software.”
The Next Generation of Virtualization
Whitehurst went on to say that Qumranet’s KVM and VDI technologies are at the forefront of the next generation of virtualization. He’s convinced these technologies represent an opportunity to raise the bar and meet the market’s demand for virtualization solutions.
Red Hat said it acquired Qumranet to forward its efforts to transform the virtualization market and drive end-to-end virtualization technology and management solutions into every system, from servers to desktops, on both Linux and Windows. With Qumranet in its portfolio, the company can offer a solution that integrates with the operating system. That brings with it a promise to drive down IT costs and enhance the flexibility and responsiveness of the IT infrastructure.
“With this acquisition, Red Hat has clearly positioned itself as a competitor within the virtual desktop market,” said Michael Rose, a research analyst at IDC. “KVM not only represents a competent platform for hosting virtual desktops and other workloads, but protocols such as SPICE will increase the performance that users can expect to experience from their server-based computing environments, making the…