Original URL: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/09/27/transitive_three_products/
Software shifting specialist Transitive continues to better define its magical play. In recent weeks, the company has reworked its product portfolio to go after Legacy, Sever and Workstation segments, while also strengthening ties with blade server maker Egenera and AMD.
These days, Transitive leads with its Quick Transit Server product, which brings applications written for Solaris/SPARC systems over to Linux on x86 gear. Transitive is best known for doing similar work pushing PowerPC software onto x86 chips for Apple via the Rosetta project and for helping IBM shove Linux on x86 applications over to Power without modification. Transitive, however, sees the Solaris/SPARC crowd as its ripest long-term target and pushes the Quick Transit Server code pretty hard.
In addition, the company now wants you to pay attention to its Workstation and Legacy versions of Quick Transit.
The Workstation code is mostly just rebadged and repriced software that again places aging Solaris/SPARC code on fresh hardware - in this case x86 laptops and workstations. Customers such as Cisco have run into problems where workers must fight over access to a server-side Solaris application.
"Cisco bought a large number of licenses for our product and started putting those applications on laptops," said Transitive VP Ian Robinson. "Suddenly, they saw a whole lot more productivity because people didn't have to line up for time to use the server software."
The Workstation software runs $875 for a single-socket system versus $1,750 per socket for the Server product.
On the Legacy product front, Transitive offers a package for running ancient 2.5.1 and 2.6 versions of Solaris on newer hardware. This gives customers the option of keeping some niggling but needed software around without having to manage a decaying box. Quick Transit Legacy starts at close to $5,000.
You can find the three product groups broken down here (http://www.transitive.com/solutions/personal.htm), although Transitive's web site is a bit of a work in progress. (The company only sells Workstation direct via the web site.)
Next month, Transitive will move a Solaris/SPARC to Solaris/x86 product into beta and then ship three versions of that software in production form by the end of the year. In addition, Transitive will ship Server and Legacy versions of its Solaris/SPARC to Linux/Itanium product "within the next month". That's mostly meant for the HP set.
The Itanium package seems to be arriving rather late since Transitive once promised (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/20/transitive_hp_novell_sun/) it in July.
Transitive has quite close ties with the likes of HP, Sun, Intel, SGI, Apple and IBM and now considers Egenera and AMD good friends too. It announced partner programs with both vendors in the last couple of weeks that could lead to deeper engineering work.
If all goes really great, Intel, AMD and other chip makers might build hardware hooks for Transitive's translation software into future versions of their products to improve performance, according to Robinson. Intel and AMD have already done similar things for virtualization software makers.
"In another generation or two, there are definitely things that can be done in the silicon to make our product work more efficiently," Robinson said. ®
Dell enters PAN Manager's Labyrinth (25 March 2008)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/03/25/dell_egnera_pan_manager/
Solaris SPARC to x86 software highway opens (19 March 2008)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/03/19/transitive_solaris_sparc_x86/
Code morpher Transitive dives into Red Hat Exchange (13 December 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/transitive_rhx/
Promiscuous Transitive beds Hitachi's boxes and sales folk (29 November 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/11/29/hitachi_transitive_deal/
HP goes octal with workstations (9 November 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/11/09/hp_xeon_eight_core_workstation/
Intel saddles HP with new Itanium (31 October 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/10/31/intel_montvale_itanium/
Charmed by own tune, Egenera sells PAN to rivals (29 October 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/10/29/egenera_pan_manager/
IBM attacks HP's dwarf blade with muffler (4 October 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/10/04/ibm_muffled_bladecenters/
SGI fires up fancy NAS for dummies (30 September 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/09/30/sgi_nexis_nas/
One programmer's unit test is another's integration test (28 July 2007)
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/07/28/what_are_your_units/
HP and Novell double team Sun (20 June 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/06/20/transitive_hp_novell_sun/
HP smacks Sun with Solaris stick (6 February 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/02/06/hp_solaris_support/
Itanium powers world's fastest Solaris box! (27 September 2006)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/09/27/solaris_itanium/
Apple shunned superstar chip start-up for Intel (19 May 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/19/pasemi_apple/
Intel and Transitive team on RISC gender bender (8 March 2006)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/03/08/idf_transitive/
Intel announces Cloak Of Invulnerability™ (19 October 2001)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/10/19/intel_announces_cloak_of_invulnerability/
© Copyright 2008