The end of Novell

Novell, once being extremely famous with their NetWare Operating System, and also being the pioneer in Directory Service architecture, and later shifted focus to SUSE Linux, is now going to be sold to a not so well-known company - Attachmate.

The deal worth US$2.2 billion, or $6.10 per share.


Attachmate said it plan to operate Novell as 2 divisions:

• SUSE Linux
• The rest of Novell, including the ZENworks virtualization software and other networking solutions 

Beside that, Novell is also going to sell some of its intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings, a Microsoft-organized consortium. The deal worth another US$450 million.

With this acquisition, here come the end of Novell, once a technology giant with excellent products, but failed to compete with rivals such as Microsoft (NetWare vs Windows Server), Red Hat (SuSe vs Redhat Linux), etc.