Now that Attachmate has finished up its acquisition of Novell, the private equity-backed conglomerate of midrange software companies has set about breaking the company into two different halves.

For those of you who run SUSE Linux on your iSeries, System i, or Power Systems logical partitions, SUSE is now a separate division of Attachmate, much as Attachmate (with the Attachmate and WRQ products) was separate from the NetIQ security products. With the break, the SUSE Linux business and its related openSUSE development project are now separated from the burden of trying to save Novell and its NetWare and GroupWise from the revenue and profit slide it has endured for the past fifteen years. SUSE Linux, the SUSE Manager provisioning and patching tool (a clone of Red Hat Network), and SUSE Development Studio (an online software appliance packaging tool for SLES) will now be improved in a way that is best for the SUSE Linux community and leads to products that customers use and will pay for.

That’s what Nils Brauckmann, the new president and general manager of the SUSE division of Attachmate, told me last week. Brauckmann said that some of the Novell people who were doing back-office functions will be eliminated now that Attachmate has taken over, and the company has laid off the employees who worked on the Mono Project, which had created an open source reverse-engineered implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) for running C# programs. SUSE will continue to support customers who bought the commercialized version of Mono, of course.

SUSE Linux AG was founded in Germany, and with the Attachmate acquisition, the unit’s headquarters is moving back to Nuremburg. Most of the engineering, support, and sales people who worked for Novell’s Open Platform Solutions unit are still with the new SUSE company. Marcus Rex, who managed the OPS unit for years and who was chief technology officer for the SUSE Linux distro for many years, left the company in the wake of the Attachmate acquisition. Ralf Flaxa has been named vice president of engineering in his stead and will be working from Nuremburg, where the majority of SUSE developers still work, although SUSE has labs in Utah, China, and India and has tech support operations in Utah and the Czech Republic. Michael Miller has been tapped to work under Brauckmann as vice president of global alliances, marketing, and product management for SUSE and will work from Attachmate’s Seattle offices; Brauckmann will be in Nuremburg. Ronald de Jong has been named vice president of EMEA sales, working from the Netherlands, and Terri Hall is vice president of North American sales, working from California.

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Attachmate Busts Apart SUSE from Novell, Puts Own People in Charge

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

PROVO — In 1979, a startup firm called Novell Inc. began operations in Utah County and was instrumental in making the Utah Valley a focus for technology and software development.

The company’s technology contributed to the emergence of local area networks, which displaced the dominant mainframe computing model of that era. At one time, Novell was valued at around $8 billion, and was the world’s second-largest software company behind Microsoft.

But in the fast-paced, ever-changing world of technology, companies that fail to innovate and stay ahead of competitors will soon find themselves irrelevant, victims of the same forces that propelled them to the top.

At Novell’s peak in the ’90s, 70 percent of the world’s computer networks were run with its system management software. More recently, the company’s fortunes have faded under pressure from Microsoft and other Web-based competitors — prompting Novell to try to reinvent itself as a distributor of the free Linux operating system.

Just last week, Novell announced the layoff of hundreds of employees from its once bustling Provo campus, only days after the company was sold. The Attachmate Group, based in Houston, announced that it had completed a $2.2 billion acquisition of Novell and the company’s headquarters was being relocated back to Utah County from Waltham, Mass. — where it had moved in 2004.

While Novell would not offer specific numbers, an employee said approximately 800 people companywide would lose their jobs — with most of those reductions in Provo.

In 2000, Novell employed more than 6,000 workers worldwide, including 2,000 in Utah County. Today, the number has fallen dramatically to approximately 3,000 around the globe, though the company would not specify how many Utah workers would remain following the recent layoffs.

“Out of respect for those affected, we are not disclosing specific figures on layoffs,” said Ian Bruce, Novell director or public relations in an email. “The restructuring affected offices worldwide, not just Utah.”

Inevitably with these kinds of complex acquisitions, there will be some workforce reductions, he added.

As a result of the merger, Novell stock stopped trading publicly and the company was selling patents to Microsoft consortium CPTN Holdings LLC for $450 million.

Despite the layoffs, Attachmate and Novell are putting a positive spin on the layoffs, announcing that Novell would be coming “back to its roots and moving the headquarters back to Provo and back to Utah.”

“This will become the center for the Novell business going forward,” Bruce said.

Utah will again be the center for Novell operations, including management, marketing, engineering and research and development, Bruce said.

He acknowledged that while the job losses are “regrettable, we are confident that as part of The Attachmate Group, Novell will continue to innovate and prosper.”

A news release stated that Attachmate planned to operate Novell as two separate business units under the Novell and SUSE brand names.

“We think that The Attachmate Group’s acquisition of Novell provides a unique opportunity to further deliver significant value to customers and partners worldwide through innovative solutions, quality products, and exceptional service,” Bruce said. “At this scale, we will be able to bring to bear richer solutions, more talent and expertise, a larger product portfolio, and an expanded field presence to customers and partners worldwide.”

A former top executive with Novell said that the once great software firm lost its competitive edge because it was unable to match the marketing savvy of leaders like Microsoft.

David Bradford, a senior vice president and general council for Novell from 1985 to 2000, said his company did not make the adjustments necessary to keep up with other top software firms. In 1985, every company in the world needed what Novell sold, he said.

“What the company probably should have done is to remain focused on its core success with the network operating system,” he said. “Continue to optimize that and continue to do things … in the open source market to be more successful.”

Bradford also said Novell was slow to “capture and understand better” the importance of the Internet, which was another contributor to the company’s inability to stay competitive.

Still, he said he has “high hopes” for the future of Novell in the wake of its acquisition by The Attachmate Group.

“They’ve got to find the right niches to go after to be successful and to leverage their core strengths and move into adjacent, (broad) and fast-growing markets,” Bradford said. “That’s the challenge that Novell (and) Attachmate have in the future.”

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Novell finding its way back in competitive, fast-paced tech business

Novell Inc., one of Utah’s largest technology operations, merged with software company Attachmate last Monday, leaving hundreds of Provo branch workers  suddenly jobless.

But Novell is far from unfamiliar with cutbacks of colossal proportions.

Novell cut 600 Provo-based jobs in 2005, and 200 more in 2007. And now, after a $2.2 billion acquisition, nearly 800 employees have been cut from the company.

Novell did not disclose an exact number, but the majority of the cutbacks came from sales, human resources, corporate operations and the legal department. A former Novell accountant of 13 years, Pearl Adolphson, told Fox 13 the layoffs were unexpected.

“We were not told,” Adolphson said. “We were just brought in and told our jobs were gone.”

Pat Holman, former Novell employee, said in an email, “When a company goes this fast through its life cycle, the ride is bumpy for the employees. Not only did Novell launch 20,000 careers, it also ended almost all of those careers.”

Novell employee Nick Smith, 24, from Payson, said everyone knew something was coming, but none of the employees were sure who would be let go.

“A lot of my close friends were laid off,” Smith said. “I had mixed emotions. I struggled to find excitement or joy when so many of my friends were out of jobs, but at the end of the day, I was relieved to still have mine.”

In an official statement made on April 27, CEO Jeff Hawn said, “I hope you share my enthusiasm for our combined organizations’ exciting future, as we believe this is great news.”

Hawn later said the merger, and subsequent layoffs, will be beneficial for Provo and Provo employment.

Some claim the layoffs are a manifestation of Novell’s lack of innovation. Holman agrees.

“Patents line the halls of Novell as if they were small monuments to the innovation that once was,” Holman said in an email. “The brilliant minds of the engineering staff have now been reduced to a stack of paper and intellectual property up for sale to the highest bidder.  This is not unique in the software industry, but what is unique are the people behind the plaques on the wall.”

Holman founded an alumni group for former Novell employees to network and support one another.

“It is a group of people who look out for each other, chase down leads for the unemployed and pool funds together when serious trouble arises,” Holman said.

The alumni group still meets for lunch every two years.

Novell has partnered with Microsoft since 2006, describing the partnership on its website as “collaborative,” where the “customers win.” But as a result of Novell’s layoffs, some are doubting the partnership’s reciprocity.

Twitter user Roy Schestowitz said in a tweet, “Novell taught us that no matter the circumstances, Microsoft partners always end down below. Microsoft must be laughing loudly.”

Smith said the relationship between Microsoft and Novell is still competitive.

“Novell has tried to build avenues and form somewhat of a partnership to coexist with Microsoft, but I think they’re more of a competitor or a threat to Novell than anything else,” Smith said.

Still, Smith said the layoffs were a wise business decision.

“Although sad, I think it was a smart move for Novell,” Smith said. “They needed to downsize because there was a lot of redundancy in terms of positions. The employees that stayed on will work for a better company now that it’s merged: the company is leaner and more efficient.”

When asked if he feels secure in his job, Smith said with a laugh, “I do now!”

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Job cutbacks not novel concept at Novell

Employees say hundreds laid off at Novell’s Provo office

Software maker Novell Inc can proceed with a long-running antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp after an appeals court reversed a lower court’s summary judgment in favor of Microsoft.

Novell, which was bought by Attachmate Corp earlier this year, claimed that its operating system products and several of its software applications were unfairly squeezed out of the market by Microsoft in the 1990s.

In 1996 Novell made a deal assigning rights to sue Microsoft to a separate company called Caldera, which sued Microsoft over competition in the operating system market, receiving a $280 million settlement four years later.

In 2004, Novell sued Microsoft in its own right, claiming its WordPerfect word processing application was the victim of unfair competition by Microsoft, chiefly through its arrangements with computer makers.

Last year, Microsoft won a summary judgment against Novell on the grounds that Novell’s claims were subject to the 1996 agreement with Caldera, which relinquished the right to sue Microsoft.

The appeals court reversed that judgment in a ruling on Tuesday, in a 2-1 majority decision, saying that the previous agreement with Caldera covered a different set of products.

The ruling means Novell can proceed with one remaining antitrust claim against Microsoft…

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Novell wins appeal in Microsoft antitrust lawsuit