Since January, IBM has been using Transitive's technology in its IBM PowerVMTM software, which consolidates customers' Linux workloads onto IBM systems.

"IBM is focused on helping customers achieve the most pressing goals of today's environment, reducing costs, streamlining infrastructures, and quickly integrating the merging entities," said IBM Systems and Technology Group spokesperson Richard Bause. "Being able to move workloads onto IBM systems without recompiling allows customers to save on energy costs due to hardware consolidation and reduced TCO."

IBM has no current plans to relocate Transitive employees located in California and in Manchester, United Kingdom, Bause said. After closing the deal, however, the company will likely move the California personnel to one of IBM's local sites while its research and development team remains in the U.K.

Strategic Acquisition

Transitive has sold more than 10 million copies of its cross-platform virtualization technology and has 48 patents. Its product, QuickTransit, allows software applications that have been compiled for one operating system run on systems with different processors or operating systems without modifications, according to Transitive.

Transitive's technology is based on research developed at Manchester University in 1992. The company was founded five years later by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer-science lecturer, and a team of his graduate students to bring QuickTransit to market. In 2005 the company signed its first major customer -- Apple.

Apple and Silicon Graphics, along with IBM, are Transitive's OEM customers. The company has been providing QuickTransit technology to run Apple's Rosetta translation software and the product is shipped on all of Apple's Intel -based computers.

ILOG Acquired First

The acquisition of Transitive comes three months after IBM announced it would acquire France-based ILOG, a provider of optimization and visualization software and rules-management systems, for $340 million.

That deal let IBM combine its business process management, business optimization, and service -oriented architecture technologies with ILOG's rules-management software, according to IBM. IBM will now be able to help its customers send business information in real time.