Novell products slaughtered in Attachmate

Summary: A look at Attachmate news from the past fortnight, highlighting the lack of activity in this private company

IT IS not so often that we see Attachmate mentioned in the context of Linux, but it does happen sometimes.

By putting SUSE back in Germany Attachmate has distanced itself completely from Open Source software. "The various Novell assets have been redistributed across four companies in the Attachmate Group, with the management assets being assimilated under the NetIQ brand. While a full merger of the NetIQ and Novell assets will take at least a year, the (now) NetIQ team has moved with impressive speed to launch its initial consolidated families," says this new article.

Another article says:

The Attachmate Group is hammering out a strategy for bringing products to the New Zealand market, but it’s a work in progress that has only just begun, according to the company’s first New Zealand country manager.

Martin Mooney, who was appointed to his role in August, says that Attachmate places importance on selling direct and through channel partners, but it sees new opportunities for resellers.

“A lot of this is driven by customers,” Mooney says. “We need to be guided by what their requirements are. A lot of the channel can bring resources around implementation and support, and that’s very important to our business also. It’s just getting that happy medium. There’s value in it all.”

Attachmate completed its acquisition of Novell in April, whose end-user products — including Zenworks, Groupwise and Open Enterprise Server — comprise one of four business units. The other business units are Suse, the open source OS; the NetIQ family of systems management tools; and Attachmate’s terminal emulation, legacy modernisation and enterprise fraud management solutions.

Not much has been done with SUSE though. In fact, not much has been done with anything. No new releases (almost), no marketing, just deals with Microsoft and layoffs.

It turns out that McGlynn was leaving Attachmate a while back, based on this press release which we found in some places a few days ago. To quote:

Mr. Andrews also held positions at NetIQ Corporation for nearly five years. He initially managed the EMEA region and was later promoted to chief operating officer, where he facilitated the sale of the company to Attachmate WRQ in June 2006.

How has NetIQ been doing since that sale? News suggests that Attachmate actually has some clients, but this is the only article in about a month that suggests so. It does not seem as though Attachmate does anything substantial, except when Novell-paid 'studies' are getting painted as Attachmate's or Mark Benoit makes yet another appearance. Where is Attachmate going and what is it actually doing? It is a private company, so it is not so easy to tell. The financing of the Novell purchase sure was suspicious. ⬆