Azul Systems, Inc., a privately held company, develops runtime platforms for executing Java-based applications. Founded in March 2002, Azul Systems is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in London, United Kingdom; Saint Petersburg, Russia and Bangalore, India. Azul produces Zing, a Java Virtual Machine and runtime platform for Java applications that is designed to remove memory limitations and scale elastically. The company was formerly known for its Vega Java Compute Appliances, specialized hardware designed to massively scale the usable compute resources available to Java applications. Zing utilizes and improves on the software technology developed for the Vega hardware.
Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in its largest acquisition to date.
