Red Hat acquires Qumranet, continues efforts to transform virtualization

Research Triangle Park, N.C. — Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has acquired Qumranet, Inc. for $107 million, according to terms of the transaction released on Thursday.

Qumranet, an Israeli hi-tech company, has about 60 workers altogether. The company stated that none of the Israeli workers would lose their jobs.

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.

Qumranet's people 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 said the acquisition lets it offer a comprehensive solution integrated with the operating system, which the company said can drive down IT costs while simultaneously enhancing the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructure.

“Red Hat customers enjoy highly responsive, flexible and cost-effective IT infrastructures,” said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO at Red Hat. “This acquisition furthers our capability to widen the gap between open source and proprietary infrastructure software.

"Put simply, Qumranet's KVM and VDI technologies are at the forefront of the next generation of virtualization. They represent an opportunity to raise the bar and meet the market's demand for virtualization solutions.”

“With this acquisition, Red Hat has clearly positioned itself as a competitor within the virtual desktop market," said Michael Rose, 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 platform viable for a larger set of users.”

Benny Schnaider, CEO at Qumranet, said his company's technologies, when combined with Red Hat's business, product and channel capabilities, will be well-positioned to provide virtualization solutions that meet customers' business needs – for the server and the desktop. He added that Red Hat's commitment to open source means technologies can be shared, improved and enjoyed by the entire open source industry.