Summary: The mystery company which still bids to buy Novell might actually be the Microsoft executives-dominated VMware

ONE OF our readers from Brazil asks, "VMWare to buy Novell?"

He links to this new opinion piece and adds: "Too bad for Open Suse. I guess VMWare will be worst to Open Suse than Oracle is/was to Open Solaris." From the ending:

Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Murphy said in a research note that “we continue to believe that the emerging VMware relationship is the most interesting recent development to help offset the decay of the Microsoft partnership.”

Add it up and VMware may be Novell’s savior in many respects. Novell’s quarter was light on revenue as customers held back purchases. Novell is exploring strategic alternatives and IT buyers don’t want to deal with the uncertainty. Novell reported third quarter non-GAAP earnings of 6 cents a share on revenue of $199 million, which fell short of Wall Street estimates. Novell also declined to give an outlook for the fourth quarter.

We wrote about this before. VMware is one likely acquirer for Novell, or at least part of Novell. VMware is run by former Microsoft executives. ⬆