Quick transit to IBM?

IBM plans to acquire Transitive Corporation, a privately held company based in Los Gatos, California with a research and development team in Manchester, UK.

Transitive’s software, which goes by the name of Quicktransit, allows applications written for one type of microprocessor and operating system to run on multiple platforms with little or no modification.

The development of the software itself dates back to 1992, when researchers at Manchester University set themselves the goal of determining the effectiveness of a modular, retargetable, dynamic binary translator that would provide 100 per cent compatibility between different processor instruction sets.

Transitive Corporation was founded in 2000 as the vehicle to develop the Quicktransit software for the commercial market.

Since its launch, it has earned the company numerous industry awards, including the Morgan Stanley CTO Award for Innovation.

The Quicktransit software is currently included as part of IBM’s PowerVM software, which is designed to help IBM’s customers consolidate their x86 Linux programs onto IBM Systems.

Financial terms of the deal between the two companies were not disclosed.