A FINE lunch at London’s Gaucho Grill today yielded at least two discoveries. One, the rump steak and chips is very good with a glass of Malbec at this Argentine establishment. Two, Swsoft is going on a buying spree that will turn it into a datacentre automation firm.

In the hotter than hot sector that is virtualisation software, Vmware may be the Ace but Swsoft is the Joker in the pack. The company is led by Sergeui Beloussov, a CEO with that rare gift for the role - a sense of humour.

Beloussov disclosed that he is closing on "several" acquisitions, one of which is likely to be announced early next week. This will be a company analogous to Opsware, the automation outfit that recently agreed to sell out to HP. Beloussov wouldn't name the company but Israel's The Marker is reporting the target as Sphera, a company that specialises in management tools for software-as-a-service firms.

"Virtualisation is just an ingredient but automation and provisioning are bigger," he said, justifying plans to make multiple deals. How many deals? "128," he deadpans. We told you he was a card.

With nigh on $100m in revenues from the Virtuozzo server virtualisation program and Parallels desktop virtualisation sibling, Swsoft is bulking up quickly but has no near-term plans to sell or even IPO.

Instead, the company will wait to see how the market moves in this crazy hypergrowth sector that has seen Vmware achieve the same valuation as Adobe and Citrix pay $500m for Xen Source, a startup with tiny revenues.

Two major releases are planned for the next few months: Virtuozzo v4 and the first release of Parallels Server, a program that will let Windows, Linux and other x86 operating systems run alongside Mac OS X.

Beloussov says Intel and AMD are companies to watch in virtualisation with next-generation chip senabling faster virtualisation speeds thanks to privileges being doled out to tasks for handling multiple operating systems, better use of virtual memory and other tweaks.

The world+dog are lining up to kick Microsoft’s Viridian hypervisor, only likely to arrive at the back end of next year and with some features surgically removed, but Beloussov says the race isn’t to the swift.

"I don’t think it’s in massive trouble," he said. "It's the Microsoft model not to innovate. Being first to market doesn’t matter."

Read the original article on The Inquirer, here.