Sun Microsystems To Acquire Parallels For $ 205 Million
April 1, 2008
Looks like that Parallels IPO won’t be happening after all. Sun Microsystems has today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Parallels (formerly SWsoft) and all of its assets for a whopping $ 205 million. The major acquisition had been rumoured to be imminent throughout the course of 2007, but never actually went through, which led mosts analysts to believe the Herndon, VA-based company was heading towards an IPO following in VMware’s footsteps rather than being picked up by one of the big boys.
Needless to say, the acquisition is a pretty bold one, which is bound to serve as wake-up call for the entire virtualization industry. Both companies had been on a buying spree the past few months: Sun picked up innotek / VirtualBox, while Parallels recently acknowledged its January acquisition of ModernGigabyte. The acquisition is expected to be finalized by June, around the time Sun also plans to ship xVM Server.
Now it's VMware v. Sun on OS X. I guess Apple could buy Sun next. 
This could be the biggest merger since McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money. Can't wait for this story to hit the blogosphere. Someone's going to digg this any second now and the forum is going to tank 
I think that innotek and Parallels together will be a stronger competitor to VMware, and competition is good great! At least they could release a good quality free desktop product that would compete hard with VMware Fusion/Workstation and that would make VMware drop the prices of the mentioned products.