Now that Attachmate owns Novell, what does the formerly obscure company plan to do with its $2.2-billion operating system and networking prize? Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet interviewed Attachmate via e-mail CEO Jeff Hawn and this is what he told me.

Before launching into the interview, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols noted that most of Novell’s senior executive staff won’t be hanging around. Ron Hovsepian; President and CEO; Dana Russell, CFO; John Dragoon,  CMO; and Markus Rex, SVP and General Manager of open platforms and long time SUSE leader have all left. So it is that Attachmate is starting with a clean management slate.

SJVN: What’s the plan for Novell’s offerings?

JH: Business will operate as usual at Novell. We intend to operate the company as an individual business unit, meaning that there is a direct line of sight between sales, marketing, technical and professional services, product management and engineering. Novell will operate autonomously and now has the ability to focus and dedicate resources on the needs of their customers.

Current Novell and SUSE product roadmaps will remain in place. The Attachmate Group does not end-of-life products and we do not force customers to move to/from any products – we are focused on meeting the needs of our customers and that is our first priority.

SJVN: What’s the plan for SUSE’s offering?

JH: We are bringing together the products and people associated with the Novell OPS [Open Platform Solutions] business and forming a new dedicated business unit under the SUSE brand. The fundamentals remain the same: a passionate commitment to quality engineering and excellent customer service. But, this new BU structure will enable the focus, agility and adaptability required to aggressively pursue the rapidly growing enterprise Linux market opportunity. Customers, service providers and industry partners are ready for the technical performance, business value and world-class service SUSE can offer as a focused business unit.

SJVN: Why split Novell and SUSE?

JH: SUSE was acquired by Novell some time ago, and we see tremendous potential in this technology. Our hope is to bring prominence to it by giving it individual branding as a separate business unit. By separating both Novell and SUSE, we can give each of these brands the focus they need to meet the needs of their specific customers and ensure that they are successful.

SJVN: Who will manage them? I’m presuming they’ll have separate management teams? Will SUSE be headed out of Germany again?

JH: Novell and SUSE will each be run by a President and General Manager, and both ultimately report to me. Novell will be headquartered in Provo, Utah and managed by President and General manager Bob Flynn. SUSE will be headquartered in Nuremburg, Germany and will be run by Nils Brauckmann, President and General Manager.

SJVN: What plans does Attachmate for Novell/SUSE’s open-source offerings? E.g. openSUSE and Mono.

JH: SUSE sponsorship and participation in key open-source projects is a fundamental element of the business. This commitment is driven by a desire to contribute to and collaborate with the community in a way that fosters the success of open source technologies overall and creates the greatest value for our customers. The openSUSE project is a great example of vibrant and healthy collaboration. SUSE sponsorship and participation in projects like openSUSE creates great value for the community and also for SUSE customers who benefit from the innovations and advancements we create together.

SJVN: What will Attachmate’s acquisition mean for Novell/SUSE’s partnerships with Microsoft? With its VARs?

JH: Microsoft and our partners will continue to play an important role for all of The Attachmate Group business units. There are no changes to our existing partners and channels.

SJVN: Will Novell/SUSE continue its membership with the Open Invention Network [an open-source patent protection group]? The Linux Foundation?

JH:: We will continue our membership in the Open Invention Network as well as The Linux Foundation.

So, what does all this mean? Well, for customers, partners and developers it sounds like business as usual. Still, with such a clean management slate we’re going to have to wait and see how things really come out in the next few months. For the moment, if I were working with Novell I’d be cautiously optimistic.

Read the original article here:

Attachmate reveals Novell, SUSE, & Linux Plans (ZDNet)

The Attachmate Group this week finalized its $2.2 billion buyout of network industry pioneer Novell, which begins the next phase of its evolution. Attachmate will operate Novell as two separate business units, one focused on the Novell brand and the other on the SUSE Linux brand. In addition, the privately held Attachmate Group has business units focused on the Attachmate and NetIQ brands. IDG Enterprise’s Chief Content Officer John Gallant spoke with Attachmate Chairman and CEO Jeff Hawn shortly after the Novell deal was sealed to get his thoughts on what the acquisition means for Attachmate and its new and old customers.

Why does buying Novell make sense for Attachmate? One reason is that with our existing Attachmate unit and NetIQ unit, we share in many of the same customers. So there’s a high degree of overlap with the customer base and little or no overlap with the products and solutions that we offer. But we now have more to offer them. Number two, the pattern recognition here in terms of what we’ve acquired with Novell, we’ve got a mix of very mature technologies and mature markets, along with emerging high-growth technology offerings as well, e.g., SUSE Linux, the virtualization management, data center management and the like. That is consistent with what we think we’ve done well at Attachmate and NetIQ where we also have a mix of very mature technologies and those that are more in the emerging category. We think, and our customers have told us, that we do a pretty good job of managing across that broad spectrum of mature technologies that are well established and anchored in the customers’ environments to those that are emerging. So here’s an opportunity to kind of do that again.

Tell me a little bit about the organizational structure. Why keep four separate units? Within the Attachmate Group, what you will hear about and what customers will know us as is as the Attachmate unit, the NetIQ unit, the Novell unit and the SUSE Linux unit. From an organization standpoint, that makes for a clean line of sight from the customer back through our sales and services, and all the way back to product development. That gives each of our four units the ability to keep focused on specific customer needs in their specific markets. If you look back, those are four really great brands. Attachmate and Novell have been around since the ’80s. NetIQ and SUSE have been around since the ’90s. I really wanted to make sure that customers would see those brands in the most prominent way possible.

Tell me how this changes the competitive landscape. Who does this put you up against? It’s many of the same in kind of our existing markets. It gives us more to offer, for instance, in and around the identity and access management markets of security. The exception is with our SUSE Linux unit, where we are now competing with Red Hat, and we intend to focus on those opportunities and compete very hard. As it relates to the other players, the Microsofts of the world, the Symantecs and the like, we’ve already been competing with them. We now have a much stronger position with which to compete.

From a customer perspective, if you’re talking to a CIO or one of the top IT titles, what is it you want them to understand about Attachmate? What’s the overall vision you want them to get? Great products, great support, easy to do business with. And the point there is I do not have the complexity of also having to spend half my time crafting a story for Wall Street, and getting people excited about a vision. I can focus exclusively on taking care of that install base, and whether that’s new licenses into existing customers, whether that’s maintenance renewals, whether those are service offerings. You know, the types of things that are very important to customers and not always viewed in the same positive light by a Wall Street sell-side analyst who is trying to figure out where the penny per share of growth is going to come from. So our point to customers is we’re focused on your needs, we’re pragmatic about what we’re working on. I just need to get customers excited. We’ve got an install base that is plus or minus about 65,000 – that’s 65,000 of the largest commercial and governmental enterprises around the world. They already know us and we know them.

What are the next steps? What do you have to do in terms of product integration, in terms of marketing and visibility for the company, in terms of getting people to understand how this is all coming together? Number one, things are made simpler by the fact that there’s not overlap with the products and solutions. We’re not going to have any “end-of-life decisions” to make. What we’ve already communicated is that the product road maps and commitment to the existing solutions remains intact. And I’ll go beyond that. We’re going to strengthen what that means as it relates to support and as it relates to carrying forward the road map. Number two, because it’s the customers that we know in many of the cases already, we’re able to communicate with them more efficiently than we would be otherwise. So it’s really about widening that communication line into those customers and helping them understand what we’re offering across the four units. All that sums up to: this was an important deal, a milestone for us. And quite candidly, for the industry, in that these are four really strong brands. The challenge now is operating those four units to maximize their performance. That means taking care of the customers and taking care of our employees. You take care of those two constituencies and you tend to get results that you like.

Attachmate boss on Novell buyout: Great brands, little overlap