Hedge fund suitor denies Novell asset sale rumors
As the week was ending, rumors were swirling that the hedge fund suitor of Novell, Elliott Associates, which last week offered $1bn net of cash to take over the perennially struggling software maker, was going to start selling off its target's assets if it clinches a deal. This may mean the NetWare operating system biz, and …
C'mon, who'd want to buy the Netware product ? It's massively end-of-life. There can't be that much money to be made from it ?
No one unless................
There are some really juicy patents in there that would allow Elliot to go after the likes of Microsoft.
I'm assuming here that the non-MAD pact between the Microsoft Sharks and the Novell Lambs will become null & void on such a takeover.
Tux - Because he patently knows better
Neither of the parties quoted in the article are about to diss NetWare. Novell's interest is talking it up, and if Elliott are not about to talk it down in case their plans change and they decide to sell it.
The rest of us know that NetWare's value is roughly $0.
In the days of yore, it was not unusual for my old firm's many customers Netware servers to go a year between reboots.
And that was only because we had to rip them out of the cabs to blow the crud out for their annual preventive maintenance visit.
Abends, the Netware version of a Blue screen, were virtually unheard of, and always caused by a hardware fault / failure. Frequently the Adaptec SCSI controllers.
When we started switching to NT and Win2K servers, they usually needed power cycling once a month.
Some improvement!
Come back Netware, all is forgiven!
Not so sure about that. SAP can currently garner support from IBM, hp, Microsoft and the Linux crowd by offering their software with equal gusto on all fronts. If it was to buy Novell it would be seen as giving preference to Linux (SLES) and the other OS vendors would suspect SAP would start to give Linux preference over others. That might mean SAP starts finding support from other sources starting to be a bit hedged. And to defend SAP's marketshare against Oracle, SAP will need all the friends it can get. Sure, Microsoft and IBM both make competing products, and the Linux crowd are also pushing "free" alternatives, but at the moment they all see Oracle as an enemy given Oracle's new-found love of SPARC Slowaris, and the enemy of my enemy is always my friend in the software market. Staying OS agnostic is probably the smarter bet for SAP.
IBM, on the other hand, has a long relationship with Novell, has a reason to go up against Microsoft, and has the money to spare. I think far too much of hp's revenues are linked to being Microsoft's BFFL, and they're still sorting out the EDS mess. Any move by Microsoft to buy Novell would have the EU competition authorities going ape, let alone the US one, and probably the same for an Oracle purchase attempt. I see IBM
