Stockholders of networking and middleware supplier Novell voted at a specific meeting Feb. 17 to accept the merger agreement designed Nov. 21, 2010, with Attachmate Corp. and Longview Software package Acquisition Corp. Attachmate Corp. will spend $2.two billion in money, or $6.ten per share, for Waltham, Mass.-based Novell, which is beset by financial complications for plenty of a long time. Thirty-year-old Attachmate, which has about 65,000 purchasers, is definitely an IT host connectivity and systemssecurity management integrator that has offices on six continents and is also headquartered in Seattle. It happens to be owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Money and Thoma Bravo. At the time of your acquisition announcement, Novell also stated it will sell a few of its intellectual home assets to CPTN Holdings LLC,
Office 2010 Professional Plus Key, a consortium of know-how agencies organized by Microsoft, for $450 million in money. 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. mentioned 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 behavior. "Recall that Microsoft had settled outstanding litigation with Novell related to Unix in 2006,
Office 2010 Pro Key, paying what amounted to [about] $350 million to Novell over plenty of several years," Egbert mentioned. 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 longtime rumor that Novell was planning to sell its Linux server business to VMware in a separate deal turned out not to be true. Attachmate,
Windows 7 Ultimate Key, however, explained it plans to break out Novell's enterprise Linux business,
Office 2007 Keygen, SUSE, into a separate business unit and join both Novell and SUSE with its other holdings, which include NetIQ. "The $6.10 per share acquisition price appears to be a reasonable takeout value,
Microsoft Office 2007," Egbert said. "It values NOVL shares at two.7x EVrevenue and 25x forward earnings. The sale of SUSE Linux by Novell to Attachmate is also a mild positive for Red Hat."
