IBM announced today its intention to acquire Transitive, the company that offers an emulation layer (billed as cross-platform virtualization) to run applications on non-native hardware platform.
The company’s engine is behind the Apple Rosetta software that runs Mac OS applications for IBM PowerPC CPUs on Intel x86.
Transitive is also able to translate Sun Solaris applications developed SPARC architecture in a way that they can run on Linux on any x86/x64 or on Intel Itanium architecture.
In January 2008 Transitive also powered a special PowerVM Lx86 software offered by IBM, which allows to run Linux applications developed for any x86 architecture on IBM System p platforms with Power CPUs.
Probably IBM found the solution so interesting that decided to acquire the company.
The entity of the acquisition is unknown.