Red Hat, in its effort to transform the virtualisation market, has acquired a privately held open source software company, Qumranet, for 7 million. The acquisition includes Qumranet's virtualisation solutions, its KVM platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which together present a comprehensive virtualisation platform for enterprise customers. In addition, Qumranet's team of professionals that develop, test and support Qumranet solutions, and its leaders of the open source community KVM project, will join Red Hat. The Qumranet acquisition also extends Red Hat's virtualisation solutions for managing Windows desktops. Solid ICE is a high-performance, scalable desktop virtualisation solution built specifically for the virtual desktop. Solid ICE is designed to enable a user's Windows or Linux desktop to run in a virtual machine that is hosted on a central server. It is based on the industry-leading Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) protocol, which overcomes key barriers to VDI adoption, including asuperior user experience enabled by the SPICE protocol capabilities. The acquisition will help Red Hat to drive comprehensive virtualisation technology and management solutions into every system, from servers to desktops, on both Linux and Windows. Red Hat's solution components include an embedded hypervisor, which supports all major operating systems, a management platform for both virtual and physical systems, cloud and grid management solutions, clustering solutions, and integrated security infrastructure.