Sun Acquires Server Maker, Rejoins With Co-Founder

Sun Microsystems Inc. said on Tuesday that it has agreed to acquire Kealia Inc., a privately held server maker led by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.

In acquiring the Palo Alto, Calif., company, Sun said it was "going back to the future" with Bechtolsheim agreeing to rejoin the company he helped establish 20 years ago. Bechtolsheim was vice president of technology at Sun from 1984 to 1995, and was chief architect of Sun's workstation product line.

"It is great to have Andy (Bechtolsheim) back home at Sun," Scott McNealy, chairman, chief executive and president of Sun, said in a statement. "We started the company together while we were at Stanford University over 20 years ago and both of us could not be more excited about working together again."

Under terms of the deal, Santa Clara, Calif.-based, Sun will acquire Kealia in a stock-for-stock merger. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of this year.

Kealia designs servers for Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor, which is a market Sun has recently entered. The company will become the Advanced Systems Technology group within Sun's Volume Systems Products organization headed by Executive Vice President Neil Knox.Bechtolsheim will serve as senior vice president and chief architect within the Volume Systems Products group, and will be a member of Sun's Executive Management Group led by McNealy.