Joshua

In a surprise announcement late yesterday, Massachusetts-based
storage giant EMC revealed that it will purchase virtual-computing
software maker VMware for $635 million. The deal expands EMC's
business into the so-called utility computing market and gives the
company another avenue for software-based revenues. The VMware deal
follows two of EMC's other recent high-profile software company
purchases: backup-and-recovery software maker Legato Systems and
digital-document software-management firm Documentum. Taken together,
these purchases send the clear signal that EMC is moving beyond the
increasingly commoditized storage-hardware market.
"Customers want help simplifying the management of their IT
infrastructures," EMC President and CEO Joe Tucci said. "This is more
than a storage challenge. Until now, server and storage virtualization
have existed as disparate entities. Today, EMC is accelerating the
convergence of these two worlds. With the resources and commitment of
EMC behind VMware's leading server virtualization technologies and the
partnerships that help bring these technologies to market, we look
forward to a prosperous future together."
VMware makes virtual-computing software that lets companies run
multiple OS environments on one machine in separate, easily managed
units. Enterprise customers typically use the software to host legacy
machine environments, such as Windows NT 4.0, as they upgrade
mainstream servers to newer OSs and to test deployments of new
systems. Users can also bring virtual-machine environments online as
needed to aid in additional server-load situations, such as those an
e-commerce site might experience during the holiday sales rush.
Because VMware virtual machine (VM) environments appear as simple
files to the host system, users can easily copy, move, or duplicate
those environments--a boon for testing and backup purposes.
Earlier this year, Microsoft snapped up VMware's largest
competitor, Connectix Virtual PC, for an undisclosed amount. Microsoft
also released the most recent version of its VM client product,
Virtual PC 2004, and will ship a server version in early 2004. Like
Microsoft, VMware ships client and server versions of its software,
and EMC now plans to integrate some of its storage technologies in
future versions of the VMware product line.

__________________
The Apexer formerly known as SnotRocket.

"Like I ****ing said, "Ok, so I hear it may be a repost. Blah But I had never seen it, so..." **** you Canta." -Jenny 12/4/2003