CALIFORNIA, USA: VMware Inc., a provider of virtualization solutions, announced that it would acquire certain products and expertise of EMC’s Ionix IT management business.

VMware to buy back $400mn shares from EMC

The all-cash transaction of up to $200 million is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2010, and is not expected to have a material impact on either EMC’s or VMware’s previous expectations for 2010.

VMware will acquire all technology and intellectual property of FastScale, Application Discovery Manager, Server Configuration Manager and Service Manager and will maintain engineering, marketing, sales and support operations in the United States, Europe, Israel, India and Australia. As part of the agreement, EMC will retain the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights to continue to offer customers the products acquired by VMware.

Paul Maritz, president and CEO, VMware, said: “Customers are increasingly leveraging virtualization as the foundation for modern IT architectures and their path to cloud computing. Essential to this evolution is the ability to provide visibility and compliance from virtualized applications down to the underlying physical infrastructure. The acquisition of these Ionix products and expertise promises to further establish VMware vCenter as the next generation management platform for private cloud infrastructures.”

Pat Gelsinger, president and COO, Information Infrastructure Products, EMC Corporation, said: “EMC Ionix has focused on helping customers simplify and automate IT management in order to accelerate their journey to the private cloud. The storage and network infrastructure is a critical building block for realizing the benefits of a private cloud. EMC will continue to focus on Ionix management capabilities for the information infrastructure, including network, storage, and Vblock solutions."