Red Hat acquires Qumranet

I just received a press release telling me that one of my clients, Qumranet, has been acquired by Red Hat.This was not entirely unexpected.

Here's what the release said

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the acquisition of Qumranet, Inc. The acquisition includes Qumranet's virtualization solutions, including its KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which together present a comprehensive virtualization platform for enterprise customers.

In addition, Qumranet's talented team of professionals that develop, test and support Qumranet solutions, and its leaders of the open source community KVM project, will join Red Hat.

This acquisition advances Red Hat's efforts to transform the virtualization market and drive comprehensive virtualization technology and management solutions into every system, from servers to desktops, on both Linux and Windows. Red Hat can now deliver what virtualization-only vendors cannot: a comprehensive solution integrated with the operating system, which can drive down IT costs while simultaneously enhancing the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructure.

This acquisition adds to Red Hat's differentiated and comprehensive solutions portfolio for the virtual enterprise, enhancing the opportunities for customers to improve the productivity and reduce the cost of IT infrastructure. Red Hat's solution components include:

• The industry’s leading open source operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with built-in virtualization.
• An embedded hypervisor which supports all major operating systems
• A consistent management platform for both virtual and physical systems, uniting servers, desktops, storage and networks
• A defining cloud and grid management solution
• Advanced, high-speed inter-application messaging
• High availability clustering solutions
• Integrated security infrastructure

Snapshot Analysis

The fact that Qumarnet has been acquired by Red Hat isn't really all that surprising when one considers Red Hat's previous statements about focusing heavily on KVM. It also tends to support the view that Red Hat, while remaining a partner with Citrix and the Xen community as a whole, wanted to control its own destiny a bit more closely.

With the addition of Qumranet's technology, Red Hat will find itself in a position few other suppliers are in. They'll have a powerful operating system, development environments, database software, virtualization technology of several types and access to a dynamic open source community.  Only Oracle and Sun have a similar portfolio.

With the acquisition of Qumranet, Red Hat now has a team of people who know KVM like the backs of their collective hands, knows virtual access, knows management of virtualized environments and having a lovely view of Tel Aviv. Qumranet is one of a number of Israeli companies that has been exploring  how virtualization technology can assist in areas of management, operations, security and the like. I hope that the folks at Red Hat allow Qumranet to continue to innovate. I suspect they will.