Slashdot Mirror
Novell & SUSE In Link Up?
dmorelli writes "Since it seems to be a SuSE news day, here's something from Friday this past. Novell tried and failed to buy SuSE, according to the
Linux Business week story."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Well, there's a whole chunk of Ximian technology in the Nterprise Linux Services beta, plus Novell is now selling Ximian Connector via Novell resellers. Besides, that merger was only a few months ago - barely enough time to change the logos on existing Ximian products, really...
Also, $120M sounds a very cheap for a company of this size. Red Hat, not quite twice the size by employees, is valued at over 2$ billion.
Well, Novell currently is a Good Company (TM)
.
They had a good idea with NDS which had no competitor in NT4. Marketing (and application support) won the market for Microsoft. With W2k microsoft came up with ADS which is as good as NDS (though it does not play well with other OSes as netware does). Novell now is trying to move from an OS company to supporting services company. NDS already runs on windows and Linux. You can download it from their website ( Note: Getting it to run on any of the newer Linuxes is a total pain).Novells plan is to move netware to a set of services that run on Linux. So they have an interest in Linux, and so are helping Linux.
Linux currently does not have anything like NDS/ADS that can support a very large and distributed network. So Novell is a good thing to happen to Linux.
Also check out their site Novell forge where they have a lot of stuff they released under GPL like their UDDI server IIRC. So they stand by GPL and put their money where their mouth is
They also tried to stop SCO by releasing what they thought were some damning counter-evidence on the day of SCOs annual investor meet day. If they had their way SCO would be buried by now.
But what you mentioned is correct, novell has a way of dropping the ball.First against NT4, then against SCO.
Anyway if you are a Linux guy, try using Novell a Netware server (free demo CDs available everywhere).They are damn stable, but their GUI sucks, reminds me of Linux of two years ago.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
According to the article, suse is worth 100 million. They were offered 120 million. Why didn't they accept?
Because valuing a company is as much art as it is science. Especially for companies like SuSE whose assets are largely intangible. They don't have much in the way of hard assets like manufacturing equipment or buildings. They have no proprietary code to speak of. Their only real assets are their brand name, whatever cash they have and the people they have working for them.
So how do you value that? It's tough. Companies are considered to be worth the present value of all their future cash flows. But how fast is SuSE going to grow? What sort of margins will they pull down? What does the competitive landscape look like? Will they grow steadily or will they grow fast and then slow down? I don't know about you, but my crystal ball isn't that good.
It's not a trivial problem to value a company. You can't answer it just by checking their market capitalization. That's just the market's current concensus on the value of the equity in the company. But debt holder, preferred stock holders and the government (taxes) all have claims to the cash flows of the company that come before the common stockholders. And the market doesn't even get the equity part right all the time. Witness the recent tech bubble bursting.
So in short, there probably was a difference of opinion on the valuation. If I think my business is worth $150 million and you think it's worth $100 million, who is right? Hard to say. It's also possible that they didn't sell just because the key shareholders didn't like the buyer. Happens all the time. Maybe the terms of the deal weren't good. If I'm the buyer and Novell is offering me stock, I'm going to think about it real hard. Novell's stock isn't exactly blue-chip. What happens if I sell and Novell tanks? Could be SuSE management wanted cash and Novell wasn't offering.
In short there are lot of reasons why it fell through. Some reasons are very sensible, some aren't. Why they turned them down? I have no idea, but I can think of a lot of possible reasons.
You can do Linux patch management in ZENWorks for Servers.
Maybe the author of the original article was thinking about the eMillennium fund - partly owned by Deutsche Bank, which is not by any means a government entity. It only sounds so (the government bank is called the Deutsche Bundesbank, and it does not do investments).
But Netware does not run on MS-DOS . And saying so makes you look a bit ill-informed.
sPh
You are clueless. Value-level (as opposed to replication of full objects only, like ADS does), transitive, event-driven (unlike ADS, which does a scan for changed objects at intervals, the default being 10 (TEN!) minutes) synchronisation; the ability to scale to hundreds of thousands of objects in a single partition; working backup/restore technology - all make NDS eDirectory far superior to ADS.
Oh, and Gartner still agrees on that and regards Novell as the leader in the meta directory field.
i can't help but feel that this discussion is senseless since the german government doesn't own shares of suse (the list of investors is available on suse's website: http://www.suse.de/en/company/suse/suse/factsheet. html).
They do have they own distro and is based in RedHat. :(
Cisco has it's own dristro to. I know this for a fact because a couple of months ago I enterviewed for a job building a Dristro for Cisco under a IBM contract.
Sadly they hired some one else
BSD licensed software can't be stolen....
The underlying assumption that you buy a company to get its technology is so wrong, even for a technology company. Brand or name recognition, distribution and marketing infrastructure, customer base, alliances / partnerships / connections are in all but the rarest cases far more valuable than any technology gained by a merger or acquisition.
What's a sig?
it's quite funny that someone would write a story without cheching such basic things... the german government doesn't own shares of suse (the list of investors is available on suse's website: http://www.suse.de/en/company/suse/suse/factsheet. html).