Novell buys 2nd semi-irrelevant company this quarter (SiteScape and now PlateSpin)

Novell announced today that they were looking to acquire PlateSpin, a Canadian company that makes software to manage virtualized servers.

I guess Novell is taking the land-grab path to get something in the virtual space but I can't see how the acquisition of SiteScape makes any sense. For that matter, PlateSpin may work in theory but regardless of what Ron Hovsepian thinks, this doesn't present a clear strategy.

At this point, what is Novell? It's clearly not an open source company.

Neither of the recent Novell acquisitions:
-Have a large volume of customers
-Are open source
-Have complimentary architectures (I think they are both Java but not sure)

When the Novell team asks why we always pick on the company during the Open Season podcasts, I wonder if they read their own news.

[jdragoon]

Dave,

Allow me to offer my perspective on your opinions on our latest acquisitions being "off strategy".

Specifically, your comments re:

At this point, what is Novell? It's clearly not an open source company.
====
Response:

We've never tried to position Novell as solely an open source company. We are an infrastructure software company with a mixed portfolio of open source and open standards based software. While we may all prefer a world where the entire software stack that customers need to run their businesses be based on open source technologies...it's simply not a reality of most if not all customer environments (today). Accordingly, we offer technologies that solve certain problems independent of the business model that created and licenses them. We clearly believe, as do you, in the power of the open source model and are major contributors to it. But it's inaccurate to suggest that Novell acquisitions that aren't pure open source are off strategy or ill founded.

We are positioning Novell as the leader in interoperability....and as you know we strongly believe the preferred operating system platform be Linux...yes SUSE Linux....and we also offer a portfolio of up the stack IT management solutions....yes most NOT open source developed or based. So the message from us is how we help clients leverage and extend their IT investments...not rip and replace. Again I respect your point of view, given your passion for MuleSource, for open source as the answer to all....we just don't think the market is quite there yet.

Neither of the recent Novell acquisitions:
-Have a large volume of customers
-Are open source
-Have complimentary architectures (I think they are both Java but not sure)
==
Response:

SiteScape. This acquisition has been very well received by clients and the analysts who cover the collaboration space. It also has very significant roots in open source (ICEcorp project http://www.sitescape.com/products/icecore.php), a commitment we will maintain and extend. It's not the largest acquisition we have made but it's very important to our Groupwise franchise and was a logical next step in the partnership we had previously with SiteScape.

PlateSpin. I've said a lot about this....more at http://www.novell.com/company/blogs/cmo/

This is VERY on strategy for us. With this acquisition, we'll extend our next generation data center capabilities by giving customers the ability to manage workloads across both physical and virtual infrastructures. It very nicely compliments our virtualization platform (SUSE Linux with XEN) and our management tools (ZENworks Orchestrator). PlateSpin has been sold to a "a large volume of customers" and now we have a solution that the over 2 million SUSE virtual servers in the market place can take advantage of (not to manage VMware, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Microsoft, etc).

Finally....I'm fine if you find it entertaining or instructive to "pick on " (your words) Novell on your podcasts. I'll just use, as you are, the open forum to react to opinion represented as fact.

Thanks

John Dragoon
Novell
CMO

[daverosenberg]

Thanks for the note John!

I will follow up with an interview request so we can all better understand what's going on there

[jdragoon]

Dave,

No worries....appreciate the conversation...and the fact that it's ok to have different views of the apple sometime....(it is an apple isn't it?). Happy to discuss further.

John

[jmmarton]

I think John answered your questions fairly well but I figured I would just answer myself with my opinions that are much simpler and take away a bit of the marketing mumbo jumbo.

VMware has excellent management tools. Xen is rather lacking such tools. Novell had some tools via ZENworks Orchestrator and ZENworks Virtual Machine Management, but now they can augment those tools via everything they get from PlateSpin. This includes sorely needed P2V and V2V tools.

Second, Novell really really needs a product to compete with SharePoint. They partnered with SiteScape last year to provide such a product. Why not simply bring all those people in-house instead of continuing to do things as a partnership? This solidifies the solution so that Novell Teaming + Conferencing can truly become an excellent alternative to SharePoint.

There you go. Acquisitions simplified.