Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Red Hat Acquires Qumranet For $107M
Red Hat announced today that it will acquire Qumranet, the company behind KVM. Now Qumranet does not make its money on KVM, instead it uses KVM as part of its desktop virtualization solutions. Qumranet is also behind the very efficient SPICE protocol. I think this is a great move on both sides and I’m excited to hear a former IBM colleague’s bold move into a startup has paid off. I knew it would only be a matter of time before Qumranet was acquired, but it’s great to see it finally went through. Great ideas and technology leadership deserve to be rewarded.
I think you can expect to see an increase in KVM usage in RHEL going forward ;-)
I saw the press release here:
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September 13th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Juan Marcos said:
I just listened to the Red Hat – Qumranet webcast and there was no talk about how long the companies have been negotiating the acquisition. Any ideas? I’m interested to know because it seemed like KVM and Qumranet would have been a perfect fit for Novell. How could Novell or others (Sun, Cisco, HP) have let this technology jewel get purchased right under their noses?
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 pm
md said:
Sometimes acquisitions happen or don’t happen for very funny reasons (e.g. access to capital, IP overlap, internal acquisition models). It’s hard to say, but I think the distinction here is that RH acquired the technology above the virtualization layer that will be great for managing the deployments. KVM will continue as a kernel project independent of any vendor, but it’s the management tooling that RH just acquired that will give it an advantage in the market.