Bach Seat

Networking pioneer Novell ceased trading on NASDAQ 04-27-11 and will be delisted, which is a sad ending for an outfit that was once one of the big names in networking. Novell completed its previously announced merger, whereby Attachmate bought it for $6.10 per share in cash and the sale of certain identified issued patents and patent applications to CPTN Holdings for $450 million in cash. Attachmate, which started as a terminal emulation company (I spent a lot of time configuring the green screen emulator as a newbie network guy) in 1982, is privately held. ZDNet says the primary owners are the private equity firms Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital, and Thoma Bravo. The Attachmate side of the company still works in X Window and terminal emulation.

When the company started up in Utah in 1979, it was a hardware company making CP/M based gear and had to be rescued from bankruptcy by a last-minute fund-raising effort. In January 1983, Ray Noorda headed the firm and introduced the multi-platform network operating system (NOS), Novell NetWare.  Originally NetWare ran on a Motorola 6800 CPU supporting 6 MUX ports per board for a maximum of 4 boards per server using a star topology with twisted-pair cabling.  Novell based its network protocol on Xerox Network Systems (XNS), and developed what it called the internetwork packet exchange (IPX) and sequenced packet exchange (SPX).

By 1990, Novell was the only choice for any company which wanted to run a network. In 1993, the company bought Unix System Laboratories from AT&T (T), with the idea of challenging Microsoft. The next year it bought WordPerfect, as well as Quattro Pro from Borland to give it an Office package. Taking on Microsoft (MSFT) did not work out so Novell sold off WordPerfect and Borland off by 1996.

Novell tries to buy its way into new markets

In 1996 it pushed into internet-enabled products and a TCP/IP stack. The result was the excellent NetWare v5.0 (Which I installed over 30 of), released in October 1998. But by 1999 Novell had lost its dominant market position, and was continually being out-marketed by Microsoft. Novell focused on net services and platform interoperability, but products like DirXML, failed to set the world alight. Between 2002 and 2003, Novell tried to buy its way into new fields, particularly Linux in November 2003, Novell acquired SuSE.

Although Novell did not stop releasing products, it did not do as well as it hoped. Its Linux business grew slowly but not enough to make up for the lack of revenue from Netware. It then scored its own goal by signing a deal with Microsoft to cover patents on Linux. This angered the Open Source community, which had seen itself at war with Microsoft. In November 2010 Novell agreed to be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion. Attachmate said it will split Novell into two units, one being SUSE.

Less than a week after completing its acquisition of Novell, Attachmate has laid off as many as 700 to 800 of Novell’s employees. According to Utah’s Daily Herald, many of the jobs that are being lost will be in the human resources, finance, accounting, and legal departments, as well as under-performing departments.

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In the interests of full disclosure, I do did hold Certified Novell Engineer certifications CNE3, CNE4, and CNE5 certs. Now that the deals are done, we’ll have to see if Attachmate lives up to its promises to keep supporting NetWare and Linux.

What do you think?

Does Novell even matter anymore?

Related articles

• Novell Swallowed by Attachmate; It’s a Done Deal; CPTN Too (groklaw.net))
• Attachmate reveals Novell, SUSE, & Linux Plans (zdnet.com)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.