By Ryan Paul
November 20, 2008 - 07:55AM CT

IBM has announced plans to buy California virtualization company Transitive for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition is part of IBM's strategy for boosting demand for its RISC-based Power systems.

Transitive was launched in the 90s by computer scientists from Manchester University, who aimed to take their virtualization research out of the lab and put it to use in industry. Their software—which is called QuickTransit—dynamically translates native code between architectures, enabling applications compiled for one processor to be run on another without any modification.

Apple became the first licensee of QuickTransit and used the technology to build Rosetta, a translation system that allowed users of Intel Macs to seamlessly run legacy PowerPC applications. IBM intends to use QuickTransit to help customers move software in the opposite direction—consolidating their Linux-based x86 applications onto Power servers. It's part of IBM's aggressive campaign to push Power migrations in the enterprise computing market.

According to Big Blue, putting Power in your data center will reduce expenses. "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," IBM spokesperson Richard Bause told NewsFactor.