Attachmate Splits Novell into NetIQ, SUSE Divisions

Attachmate closed the $2.2 billion Novell acquisition four weeks ago and split up the various Novell products across multiple business units: Novell, SUSE, NetIQ and Attachmate. Each division will be independent with its own go-to-market strategy and will have its own organization structures, Attachmate announced on May 18.
Novell’s SUSE Linux will be its own division, SUSE, competing head-to-head with Canonical and Red Hat. Attachmate will continue to develop and distribute NetWare and other Novell networking products, such as Open Enterprise Server, GroupWise and Zenworks, as part of the Novell division.

NetIQ, the systems management division, will get Novell’s identity and security programs as well as data center and virtualization products.

The Attachmate division will focus on areas such as terminal emulation, legacy modernization and enterprise fraud management.

SUSE will continue supporting the server and desktop versions of SUSE Linux, as well as oversee development and maintenance of the openSUSE community distribution. The division will develop and maintain SUSE Manager provisioning and patching tool and SUSE Development Studio. A spokesman points out that SUSE will no longer be supporting Mono, the open-source adaptation of Microsoft’s .NET architecture. Xamarin, a new company founded by Mono’s founder Miguel de Icaza, will continue work on Mono. Despite no longer being involved with Mono development, SUSE will continue to support customers who bought the commercialized version. The company clarifies its position on these technologies in a blog post.

The server distribution, SLES, will continue to be supported on IBM’s System z mainframe products.

SUSE will maintain many of Novell’s ties with other open-source projects, such as LibreOffice, the office suite that broke away from Oracle’s OpenOffice.org suite late last year, and the Linux-based Evolution email client that mimics many of Outlook’s features.

However, SUSE will no longer be supporting Mono, the open-source adaptation of Microsoft’s .NET architecture. Xamarin, a new company founded by Mono’s founder Miguel de Icaza, will continue work on Mono. Despite no longer being involved with Mono development, SUSE will continue to support customers who bought the commercialized version.

As for Novell’s cloud and data center products, they will be integrated with Attachmate’s own NetIQ portfolio, Jay Gardner, president and general manager of NetIQ, told eWEEK. The products include Novell eDirectory, Novell Identity Manager, Novell Access Manager, Novell Sentinel, Novell Operations Center and the PlateSpin product line for high-end data center virtualization management.

For more, read the eWEEK article: Attachmate Splits Novell Acquisition into NetIQ, SUSE Divisions.