I caught up with Transitive's Vice President of Marketing Ian Robinson during the week of June 9 to talk about the cross-virtualization platform provider's expanding distribution channel. Coincidentally Transitive announced it was joining TSANet the same week. According to Transitive:

"Membership in TSANet will allow Transitive to collaborate with its partners and other TSANet members in resolving joint customer service incidents."

TSANet membership consists of more than one hundred software and hardware companies, including information-technology (IT) market leaders such as Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Symantec, Sun Microsystems and Unisys. The idea is to cut down on fingerpointing between IT suppliers when you have a support issue.

Transitive's connection with all of these other suppliers is appropriate because Transitive has a shot at becoming the most important IT company you'll never deal with directly. For the enterprise, it develops software to virtualize server virtualization. Transitive also has major OEM agreements with Apple and IBM to provide other specialized types of virtualization.

To virtualize server virtualization, Transitive's major distributors include Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM (in addition to the OEM agreement) and Sun. On their systems, Transitive's software -- called QuickTransit -- sits between the hypervisor of system-supplier choice and many existing non-X86 applications and helps eliminate the need for porting such applications as users eliminate legacy hardware in their data centers. Robinson euphemistically calls this "server refresh," but it is really your systems supplier's worst nightmare because it gives you a chance to break their lock on you.

On IBM Power systems it works a little differently because of the OEM arrangement, but the principle is the same: without porting, the software runs "without source code or binary changes," according to Robinson. Transitive has good partnerships with Citrix/Xen, Microsoft and VMware to make sure the hypervisor layers do their thing. Down at the bare metal, Transitive works with AMD, IBM and Intel.

So with Transitive now in TSANet, ideally you'll never hear of the company again while using its products constantly.