Microsoft acquires Connectix VM assets
eWeek | at | by Mike
Microsoft has acquired the Virtual Machine assets of Connectix Corp., a privately held company in San Mateo, Calif., that has been involved in Virtual Machine (VM) technology since its inception in 1988. One of the motivations behind the move, at least from the perspective of Microsoft's server group, is to offer a solution that will allow Microsoft customers running an NT 4 line of business applications to continue to run these as a virtual machine alongside the upcoming Windows Server 2003 product family.
Bill Veghte, Microsoft's corporate vice president, told eWEEK that while there were things he could do on the tool side with imaging, "the piece that I really needed was the ability to run all the NT4 business applications out there as a virtual machine. "The only way I know how to guarantee compatibility for those NT 4 applications is to build off of Connectix, which uses COM interfaces. They also use our Win32 APIs pretty aggressively and they use our driver subsystems, so it was a very good fit," Veghte said.