Sun Microsystems, Inc., a listed US corporation, announced on February 12, 2008 that it will acquire German company Innotek GmbH.
Sun Microsystems is a leading provider of hardware, software and services for network computing. The California-based corporation is represented in over 100 countries and has a market capitalization of EUR 9.75 billion. Innotek is one of Europe’s top manufacturers of operating systems technologies and software for the virtualization of PC systems. Innotek’s open source virtualization software “VirtualBox” has been established as a leading developer desktop virtualization platform. For Sun Microsystems, the VirtualBox complements its own Xen-based solution, Sun xVM. Sun will further develop the VirtualBox as an open source product.
Sun Microsystems was advised by the following Gleiss Lutz team: Dr. Christian Cascante (partner, corporate/M&A, Stuttgart, lead), Dr. Jochen Tyrolt (corporate/M&A, Stuttgart, co-lead), Dr. Stefan Weidert (partner, IP/IT, Berlin), Dr. Martin Viciano Gofferje (corporate/M&A, Stuttgart), Dr. Alexander Molle, Dr. Julia Schulz (both IP/IT, Berlin), Dr. Steffen Krieger (employment, Stuttgart), Dr. Meike Gotham (employment, Berlin), Dr. Norman Senk (employment, Stuttgart), Dr. Achim Dannecker (partner), Dr. Alexander Werder (both tax, Stuttgart) and Dr. Ingo Brinker (partner, antitrust, Munich).
Partner Christian Cascante pointed out that “transactions of this kind show that it is key to have experts not only in the area of corporate/M&A, but also in other areas such as IP and employment law.”
Support was also provided by Herbert Smith’s Moscow office, which advised on individual aspects of the transaction related to Russian law.
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