Novell/SUSE Prime for Aquisition?
Ho Kooshy Fly writes "Supposedly Novell/SUSE looks like a good buyout target now. The likes of the obvious, IBM and the less obvious Cisco might be interested in integrating in the new Novell/SUSE company into their portfolio." Lucent, AT&T, and HP are also mentioned as possible buyers, but it's important to remember that it's all still just speculation.
Since Novell, as part of its sale of the UNIX licenses to SCO, retained the right to require SCO to "amend, supplement, modify or waive any right" under the license agreements (and if SCO did not comply, Novell could exercise those rights itself on SCO's behalf)....See http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=13 03_0_3_0_C
IBM would be duplicating a lot of software effort if they were to purchase Novell and it's tech portfolio. For example NDS and ZenWorks would compete directly with Tivoli.
SuSE might be useful as they have global acceptance which may help to sell more Linux products and solutions to the global marketplace vs. RHES.
HP probably won't buy it (yet). If they do it will be to take SuSE for use as their Linux solution provider, and to put down Novell to garner further favor from Microsoft- who also power their midrange backoffice offerings. But HP is still cooling down from the Compaq merger. It's too soon to look at Novell while simultaneously keeping it's current investors happy (they should be focusing on ops as is).
Maybe it'll be Oracle, to use as another pawn in their game to beat everybody else (read: Microsoft) no matter what the cost.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I'm wondering if they are trying to posture themselves as an infrastructure company, a solutions brand, not a hardware company.
Novell and it's assets (particularly app servers, resource management and clustering stuff) would make that a possibility.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Look at the name of the analyst - Laura Didio.
Maybe you remember her from her SCO kernel source code news?
Just look at who's predicting that Novell will be aquired. It's Laura Dido, the same analyst that said SCO had a case. Why should anyone believe her now anymore than they did on the SCO code thing?