The Members Forum

Who really bought Novell? Of course, I know that Attachmate is the company that's on record as purchasing Novell for $2.2-billion, while Microsoft shelled out $450 million for some Novell intellectual property. But tell me, where did Attachmate get $2.2-billion? Could it have been Microsoft? I think so.

I've covered Attachmate over the years, so I knew who they were when the news broke that Attachmate had purchased Novell. What I couldn't see was where the heck they had gotten the money for the deal. Attachmate's main business over the years has been software terminal emulation. That's a business line that's been dying ever since the Web came along in the early 90s.

I mean who needs to emulate a mainframe 3270 terminal, a mini-computer VT-102 terminal, or even a Windows-based X-term today? There are only a handful of people who still need that kind of thing. In short, even with its NetIQ systems and security management subsidiary, Attachmate is a niche company in a declining industry segment. There's no way they had a spare billion and change to buy Novell.

There's also no real synergy between Attachmate's offerings and Novell's. From a business standpoint this is a deal that might have made sense in the late 80s or early 90s, when PC-based X-terminals were much more useful in working with Unix and Linux servers. Today, the deal, as its being presented to the public, makes no sense to me.

Unless, of course, Microsoft is the company that's actually controlling the purse strings. Then, the deal makes perfect sense.

First, it's a great tactical move because it keeps Novell SUSE Linux out of the hands of VMware. The last thing Microsoft wanted was for VMware, its major cloud and virtualization rival, to have a major operating system to offer to its customers. Microsoft is having a hard enough time getting its Hyper-V virtualization and Azure cloud marketing story straight without having to compete with the one-two punch of VMware and SUSE Linux.

Computerworld has the Editorial HERE!