On Tuesday, Big Blue made an announcement of taking over Transitive, a small company in the Silicon Valley which focuses on easing the movement of programs from one type of hardware to another.
Transitive’s made its mark in the year 2006 when Apple switched from using PowerPC chips to Intel chips. It was therefore required that software developers rewrite their programs in accordance with Intel’s architecture in order to bring about the hardware shift which raised the possibility of customers using PowerPC-based computers hitherto shunned by Apple.
Since this big shift by Apple, top server makers such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems have struck deals with Transitive. Transitive’s deliverables, in all these contracts, has been to enable the shifting of applications between hardware running on different operating systems and processors.
One of the major names in the arena, IBM, was looking to move software operating on Linux operating system server and Intel chips over to servers based on its in-house Power processors and hired Transitive for the same.
An impeding problem that Transitive was facing was that there was not much expansion possibility other than the ongoing services, since it had already covered most of the major chip and operating system platforms.
Possessing Transitive’s technology, engulfing customers of H.P and Sun to its own servers would be a light task at hand for IBM. With the other translation programs of IBM on shaky grounds, this sure should bring some cheer to the Big Blue.
