Transitive’s Breakthrough Hardware Virtualization Products Eliminate the Need for Software Porting

“QuickTransit® ™” Software Allows Applications to Run Transparently on Multiple Hardware Platforms with No Source Code or Binary Changes

Los Gatos, Calif. – September 13, 2004 – Transitive Corporation, the leading provider of software that enables transportability of applications across multiple processor and operating system pairs, today launched its QuickTransit®™ product line, a family of products that allows software applications compiled for one processor and operating system to run on another processor and operating system without any source code or binary changes. The company’s breakthrough hardware virtualization technology is unique because it provides 100% functionality, transparent interactive and graphics performance, near-native computational performance, and allows virtually any processor/operating system pair to be supported.

The first products available in the QuickTransit®™ product line are:

QuickTransit® for Itanium®: with support for MIPS®, POWER™/PowerPC®, x86, and mainframe binaries

QuickTransit® for Opteron®: with support for MIPS, POWER/PowerPC, and mainframe binaries

QuickTransit® for x86: with support for MIPS, POWER/PowerPC and mainframe binaries

QuickTransit® for POWER/PowerPC: with support for MIPS, x86, and mainframe binaries

The QuickTransit® product line allows computer OEMs to rapidly increase the number of user-written and ISV (Independent Software Vendor) applications available on their platforms; it enables ISVs and internal software development groups to eliminate porting costs; and it allows IT services companies to migrate their customers’ legacy applications to modern platforms at a fraction of the existing cost.

“The reality is that it’s often difficult and expensive to port software applications to hardware platforms,” said Bob Wiederhold, President and CEO of Transitive Corporation. “QuickTransit® breaks the burdensome history of hardware/software dependency and therefore provides immediate benefits to the computer industry. QuickTransit® dramatically reduces the cost, risk and time-to-market to support new or multiple hardware platforms, and it makes significantly more software available on computer platforms.”

How QuickTransit® Works

QuickTransit® utilizes a unique and patented modular architecture. It runs on top of the operating system, with no end user intervention. As a translated application runs, the QuickTransit® “front-end decoder” reads in blocks of binary code and translates them into an intermediate representation (IR). An “optimization kernel” then optimizes the code represented in the IR, and a “back-end code generator” encodes the optimized blocks for the target processor and caches them. QuickTransit®’s high performance comes from exploiting the fact that only 10% of the code in a typical application is executed 90% of the time. So, the optimizing kernel looks for frequently executed blocks of code and aggressively optimizes them as they are identified. The QuickTransit® architecture is modular, allowing front-end decoders and back-end code generators to be easily mixed and matched for the source and target environment.

QuickTransit® products support applications written in any language including C, C++, Fortran, Cobol, Basic, Ada, Pascal, Modula, PL/1 and assembly language. QuickTransit® products let software applications run on the target platform exactly as they run on the source platform, with 100% functionality. Graphics and interactive performance are transparent, and computational performance is 80% of what could be achieved with a native port, which is often higher performance than is available on the original platform. Today’s Itanium, Xeon™ or POWER processors, for example, offer 10 times the computational performance of mid-1990’s mainframes. Using QuickTransit® software, today’s processors could run the unchanged mainframe applications 8 times faster.

The system resource overhead of the translation process is small. QuickTransit® itself uses only 500 KB of memory and requires approximately 10-30 MB of additional memory for large server applications, or around 25% of program memory for smaller applications.

Availability and Pricing Model

Transitive’s QuickTransit® products are currently available and shipping to major OEM customers. Pricing for QuickTransit® products is based on a one-time technology license fee and a usage fee model that depends on the customer’s deployment strategy.

Industry Analysts Comment on QuickTransit®

Tony Iams, lead analyst, Systems and Software Virtualization, D.H. Brown Associates
“Employing new virtualization techniques, the QuickTransit® family allows software compiled for one processor and operating system to efficiently run on another processor and operating system, while maintaining full functionality. Transitive's family of software migration products dramatically reduces the obstacles users face when switching hardware platforms, allowing them to preserve their software investments so that the expense and time involved in porting code is minimized.”

Rob Enderle, principal analyst, Enderle Group
“For the last 3 decades we have chased, unsuccessfully, true software portability and the cost benefits it would bring to the technology buyer. These benefits include improved reliability, the near elimination of image management, and a dramatic reduction in hardware migration costs. While inexpensive hardware and rapidly increasing performance drove the last decade it also set the stage for products like Transitive’s QuickTransit® which are set to redefine the current decade of reduced costs and greater flexibility”.

Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst, Insight 64
“Since the dawn of the computer era, the need for binary compatibility with instruction set architectures and operating system interfaces has locked users into proprietary environments. The cost of adapting application software to run on incompatible hardware or operating systems almost always exceeds the cost of purchasing compatible systems that run the original software without change, even if those incompatible systems cost less to acquire or operate. The failed attempts of companies that have tried to break the chains of binary compatibility that bind users to obsolete platforms litter the industry landscape. None of these earlier approaches delivered the performance needed to make their solutions useful in practice. Transitive’s ability to deliver up to 80 percent of ‘native’ performance, when executing binary images targeted for one platform on incompatible hardware or software platforms, could be a game-changing event that restructures the computer industry.”

Tony Massimini, Chief of Technology, Semico Research
“Transitive’s QuickTransit® is a significant enabling technology. By efficiently resolving the burdensome or even prohibitive time and cost issues of moving applications to a new platform, it gives computer OEMs a new capability to get their customers through an upgrade cycle much more quickly.”

Jim Turley, principal analyst, Silicon Insider
“The more you know about it, the more amazing this gets. Transitive’s QuickTransit® allows software to run on ‘foreign’ computers. It just works, but it shouldn’t. To the customer, user, or casual observer nothing special is happening and everything runs fine. To an engineer, it’s amazing. Transitive has been developing and fine-tuning this technology for a number of years and they’ve really got it nailed down to the point where it’s impressive in its simplicity.”

About Transitive Corporation

Transitive Corporation is a pioneer and leader in providing solutions that allow the transportability of software applications across multiple hardware platforms. The company’s hardware virtualization technology allows software applications that have been compiled for one processor/operating system to run on another without any source code or binary changes and at speeds comparable to native ports. The technology dramatically reduces software developers’ cost, risk, and time-to-market of supporting multiple hardware platforms, facilitates OEM customers’ migration to new platforms, and makes significantly more software available on hardware platforms. Transitive Corporation is located in Los Gatos, California with a research and development team in Manchester, England. The company is privately held, with funding participation by Pond Venture Partners Ltd., Manchester Technology Fund, and Crescendo Ventures. For more information, please visit Transitive’s website at http://www.transitive.com.

Transitive, QuickTransit and the Transitive logo are registered trademarks of Transitive Corporation and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.