virtualization.info has just learned that PlateSpin, leader in the P2V migration market, has been acquired by Novell.
The canadian firm acquisition further boosts Novell visibility in the virtualization space.
Novell already has a major involvement in the market since the early days of Xen development in 2004, when the company was announcing the inclusion of the open source hypervisor in its SUSE Enterprise Linux.
After that first step another acceleration was provided by the interoperability agreement signed with Microsoft in 2006.
PlateSpin is a valuble acquisition target for Novell not just because of its flexible migration tool, PowerConvert, but also because of the other products in its offering: a capacity planning tool, PowerRecon, and most of all a new disaster recover solution called Forge.
These technologies will probably go integrated with the Novell management solution ZENworks, adjusted to handle virtual machines since end of 2006.
At the moment nor Novell neither PlateSpin officially announced the acquisition. This will probably happen tomorrow, when VMware VMworld Europe 2008 will open in Cannes, France.
virtualization.info will publish a live coverage of the morning keynotes and all the other virtualization vendors announcements. So stay tuned!
Update: Novell announced the acquisition, which is worth $205 million and will complete in Q2 2008.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.