Last week Red Bend Software, a mobile software management company, announced the acquisition of the virtualization startup VirtualLogix (formerly Jaluna) for an undisclosed sum.
VirtualLogix is a US company founded in 2002 and focused on hardware virtualization for embedded devices. It offers a hypervisor, VLX, that can run real-time operating systems side by side with Windows and Linux flavors as guest OSes on Intel, Texas Instruments, Freescale and ARM and Power architectures.
Leading venture capital firms like Intel Capital, Index Ventures, Atlas Ventures and Esprit Capital Partners invested in the company so far.
VirtualLogix has very few competitors, including Trango Virtual Processors, which has been acquired by VMware in November 2008, and Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), which received a major investment from Citrix in January 2009.
Red Bend technology, vRapid Mobile, has been used in Kyocera, LG Electronics, Motorola, Sharp, Sony Ericsson and ZTE handsets.
With this acquisition the company is betting on a fragmented, enterprise-ready mobile ecosystem.
In the past, in fact, the mobile phones operating system wasn’t very relevant for corporations (with the exception of RIM and its Blackberry), but the advent of more sophisticated and powerful smartphone and tablets like the Apple iPhone and iPad completely changed the game and now the enterprise market looks at these devices as fully featured replacements of notebooks and netbooks.
On top of that, the new software distribution paradigm that the AppStore and its clones represent, along with the harsh competition between the Apple iOS and the Google Android OSes, continues to attract and divide the software developers, at the point that a mainstream adoption of hardware virtualization in embedded devices seems quite possible in the near future.