Attachmate seals $2.2B Novell deal

The Attachmate Group announced Wednesday that it has completed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Novell, a networking pioneer in the 1980s that’s now being described as “a leader in intelligent workload management” by its new owner.

The proposed buyout was announced in November and Attachmate is sticking to its plan outlined then to operate Novell as two separate business units  under the Novell and SUSE brand names.

Attachmate Group, based in Houston, also operates the Attachmate and NetIQ units.

Attachmate Group’s leadership says its four businesses complement each other and don’t overlap. The company will offer a wide variety of products, including management software, open source tools, collaboration products, security software, identity and compliance management, as well as virtualization and cloud computing products.

Attachmate’s portfolio for the time being will also include Novell patents that a Microsoft-organized consortium had wanted to buy but that was prevented from doing so by a recent Department of Justice decision. There was concern that the sale could harm the open source software market, and the review of the sale held up the Novell buyout.

Novell started up in Utah and made a name for itself in the 1980s with its once dominant NetWare network operating system, but in recent years has struggled financially as it attempted to establish leadership in markets from open source software to workload management.The company earlier this month introduced an enterprise social networking suite dubbed Vibe.

Novell, which had since moved to Massachusetts, had strung together eight straight quarters of year-over-year revenue declines at the time the acquisition was announced.

As for Attachmate, the company was known early on for its terminal emulation software and more recently has expanded into management software, with buyouts of companies such as NetIQ and OnDemand Software.