Novell seeks rich suitors

It looks like Novell has formally put itself up for sale after rejecting the entreaties of a hedge fund two months ago. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by a separate report from the New York Times, Novell had asked for suitors looking to eat the company to put in initial bids by the end of this …

[Anonymous Coward]

For Sale, classic 80s IT company, $1bn ono.

About time; Novell cannot limp along like it has been doing for much longer.

[Anonymous Coward]

@For Sale, classic 80s IT company, $1bn ono

"Novell cannot limp along like it has been doing for much longer"

I wish I had a quid for every time I heard that since about 1993. I could retire.

[Random_Walk]

Dunno...

If Novell could ditch (read: spin off) the NetWare portion as a niche company, and focus on Linux, they would have a chance at actually getting somewhere.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Maybe

SCO can buy it....

[Viv]

But SCO thought

But SCO thought they already owned it?

[Mikel]

If patent trolls carve up Novell

Then progress in networking will come to a complete halt, as flocks of IP Buzzards with no useful purpose sue everyone in the industry out of the depth of their ancient patent portfolio.

Surely preventing that is worth a billion bucks to somebody? Please?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it wouldn't

Why would carving up Novell have any impact on progress in networking? The likes of Cisco have more influence.

[Jabro]

Does Novell have a valuable patent collection?

I assume the "networking" the poster was referring to was application and OS networking technology, which is where Novell made all of its money in the Netware glory days, rather than networking hardware like Cisco's routers and switches.

That is an interesting question - does Novell have a lot of (relevant) patents, networking or otherwise? And, if so, has Novell incorporated those patents into its OSS products and released them under GPL like licenses, thus rendering them worthless to would be patent trolls?

[David Halko]

Sun & IBM

Timothy Prickett Morgan writes, "Just like it was a bit curious as to why Sun figured it was worth more of a premium than IBM was willing to pay."

The story is not quite as clear as you made it.

There was a tepid confidential agreement between Sun & IBM. IBM leaked information to the press and depressed the value of Sun (i.e. FUD.) IBM decided to start trending the offer downward. Executives at IBM were also involved in insider trading in regard to Sun.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/16/ibm_intel_insider_trading/

The situation from IBM jut stank to high-heaven, we may never know the whole story, and people were arrested over it.

Oracle clearly saw a premium value in Sun. Sun has some mature technology that no one else in the industry has a competitive production alternative (i.e. ZFS, DTrace, Zones, etc.) and some awesome availability benefits not in Linux (i.e. LiveUpgrade.)

[mikew]

Not a mystery

"Why Novell thinks it is worth more than $1bn is a bit of a mystery".

Erm.... Well, it has no debts and more than $1 billion in the bank, so that's not really such a mystery...!

[Trevor Pott o_O]

Microsoft Linux

Wierder things have happened.

[Anonymous Coward]

Networking progress?

Even in the apps and OS layers, what difference would it make if Novell went the way of the Dodo? Most people, even those who started in the industry in the early 80s, aren't even aware that Netware is still clinging on in some organizations, most of whcih are likely planning to migrate to Windows or a Unix platform as soon as they can free themselves from the Netware hosted services.

Novell made a worthy contribution to networking, like 2 decades ago, the world has since moved on.

[Adam Shailes]

More FUD... Novell techology is way ahead of the competition!

Novell today is still making worthy contributions to this sector. Its only FUD that archs on about the past that at every point people try and write Novell off.

Lets take the three following:

NSS (Novell Storage Services) is far more adavanced the NTFS. If I have a folder that has lots of files/sub folders on a OES 2 Linux or NetWare Volume) and I assign a file rights its just done. Do that on even the latest verison of Server 2008 and I can make lots of cups of tea whilst I wait for it to happen.

Need to get workstations to Windows 7, ZCM 10 (Zenworks 10) can with a few clicks, can take all the personal settings of a Windows machine, then auto reimage that machine with Windows 7 and then restore the personal settings.

eDirectory winds hands down on perforance and time to replicate changes compeared to AD.

Having just attended Brainshare Amsterdam, Novell still has clients and its winning business. So ratter then speard the fud, check out what it can do for you.

Adam