Attachmate acquires Novell for $2.2 Billion
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 23 November 2010, 19:51 IST
Printer Print Email Email
New York: Attachmate is agreed to acquire Novell, provider of infrastructure software, for $2.2 billion in cash. Novell also plans to sell some intellectual property assets like patents for $450 million to a consortium of technology companies led by Microsoft. Novell and Microsoft did not disclose which patents were sold or the names of the other companies in the coalition. Attachmate has effectively served as an acquisition vehicle, led by three private equity firms: Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. In 2005, the investment team bought Attachmate for an undisclosed sum and immediately merged it with an earlier buyout, WRQ. The offer, at $6.10 a share, is a 9.1 percent premium from Novell's closing stock price on Friday. And it is a 28 percent premium over Novell's closing share price on March 2, when one of the company's major shareholders, the hedge fund Elliott Associates, submitted a takeover offer for $5.75 a share. Novell's board swiftly rejected the bid as 'inadequate' and the matter was apparently shelved. Under this new deal, Elliott will stay on as an equity shareholder of Attachmate. Founded in 1983, Novell rose to prominence for its network operating system, Netware. In the mid-1990s, however, the company started to make acquisitions to compete in the enterprise space, picking up companies like Cambridge Technology Partners, Unix System, SilverStream Software, Ximian and SUSE, a Linux-based operating system business. When the company started to explore its options this year, there were several buyers for parts of the business but few for the whole entity.

siliconindia