Attachmate Merger Gets Novell Stockholders’ Blessing

Stockholders of networking and middleware provider Novell voted at a special meeting on February 17 to accept the merger agreement made with Attachmate  and Longview Software Acquisition.

Attachmate will spend $2.2 billion (£1.36 billion) in cash, or $6.10 (£3.76) per share, for Novell, which has been beset by financial problems for several years.

Thirty-year-old Attachmate, which has about 65,000 customers, is an IT host connectivity and systems/security management integrator that has offices on six continents and is headquartered in Seattle. It is owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo.

Break Up Could Still Benefit Microsoft

At the time of the acquisition announcement, Novell also said it will sell some of its intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organised by Microsoft, for $450 million (£278 million) in cash. This payment will be contained in the amount to be paid by Attachmate, Novell said.

Novell did not specify which assets Microsoft will get but senior IT analyst Katherine Egbert of Jefferies & Co said in November that they are “most likely related to WordPerfect, which Novell acquired in the late 1990s, and through which Novell had sued Microsoft for anti-competitive behaviour.

“Recall that Microsoft had settled outstanding litigation with Novell related to Unix in 2006, paying what amounted to [about] $350 million (£216 million) to Novell over several years,” Egbert said.

The WordPerfect product line was sold twice, first to Novell in June 1994, which then sold it to Corel in January 1996. However, Novell kept the WordPerfect Office technology, incorporating it into its GroupWise messaging and collaboration product.

The long-time rumour that Novell was planning to sell its Linux server business to VMware in a separate deal turned out not to be true. Attachmate, however, said it plans to break out Novell’s enterprise Linux business, SUSE, into a separate business unit and join both Novell and SuSE with its other holdings, which include NetIQ.