On April 1st, thinking it was a good idea, the guys at virtualization.com published a fool’s joke about the Sun acquisition of Parallels for $205 million.
The news was eventually picked up by Google News and so, despite it was an evident fake (the claimed price is well below any possible estimate) somebody republished the article while others asked for more details to Parallels.
The fake news didn’t impact the stock market luckily, with JAVA shares started at $15.68 and closed at $16.00, but virtualization.com guys may have risked a lawsuit.
What makes this story interesting anyway is the public answer that Parallels took care to publish on the corporate blog.
Despite the article is titled Parallels is not for sale it seems quite the opposite: Ilya Baimetov, Directory of Technology, explains how the claimed price would be too low (which means that Parallels is for sale, it’s just a matter of money as usual), and how Sun is not the best buyer.
Baimetov mentions a couple of obvious virtualization players which could buy Parallels, Microsoft and VMware, along with an unexpected third one: HP.
Besides providing virtualization-ready hardware for VMware and for Citrix, so far HP never showed a clear interest to become a virtualization player.
So why mentioning HP? Why Baimetov didn’t also mention other OEMs like Dell and IBM?
Maybe HP is actively pursuing an acquisition in the hardware virtualization market and Parallels took this opportunity to manifest its availability, or the company is just suggesting HP that its acquisition may be a good idea.
He who has ears to hear…
Update: To discourage the speculation published in this post Baimetov updated his original post and included IBM to the list of meaningful buyers for Parallels.
Second update: It seems that virtualization.com didn’t like much the reactions generated by their own joke. Here it is a follow-up.