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Hedge Fund Offers $2 Billion For Novell
CWmike writes "A hedge fund that is already one of Novell's largest shareholders offered on Tuesday to acquire the struggling, cash-rich enterprise software maker for $2 billion. The unsolicited offer, from New York-based Elliot Associates L.P., is for $5.75 per share in cash, a dollar per share more than Novell's closing price Tuesday of $4.75. The offer caused Novell's stock to leap 29% to $6.15 in after-hours trading. Because Novell is so cash-rich — it had $991 million in cash and equivalents at the end of January (PDF) — Elliott says the deal values Novell as an enterprise alone at about $1 billion."
beyond that norton is not novell, novell actually has a pretty strong enterprise presence. A hedge fund buying novell is a really bad sign, to be honest. Novell is doing fine. Them trying to label Novell as unsuccessful is basically a flat out BS.
What I suspect this means is that someone's trying to stop Novell before the Novell v. SCO case comes around. They're trying to see if the Novell board is greedy enough to do it, and I suspect they aren't and neither are the shareholders.
A hedge taking over a company if that hedge has no experience managing in the sector of the company they're taking basically means they're going to tack on association/management fees onto novell and dump them to someone else.
You MUST be dense. Novell has SUSE Linux, which is the preferred Linux to run on Z series. The consulting services alone for such a venture would be pretty expensive, but worth every penny. SLERT is used by some of the best brokerage houses on wall street and other places as well. They own Ximian, they also have their extensive IDM suite as well as lots of other group and middleware products. The problem with Novell is that they don't market well enough. Given the chance to replace Red Hat with SUSE I would jump at the chance.
Or Microsoft is behind this and they want full control of Novell...
Eh, the story is about Novell, and nobody has used the word Microsoft and Linux yet, and they usually go together with 'Novell'...
Oh, and the SCO vs Novell trial is still on the 'todo list' for the courts...
Who knows what is really going on here... People tend to think long and hard before offering to spend $2B of their own money...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Novell has been taking good care of Suse Linux. Since Novell bought them, they continued working on what I think is the best Linux distro, without hindrance, boosted their marketshare and helped in giving Linux a corporate-friendly image. I hope the new owners of Novell (should such takeover really take place) will have a hands-off approach and let things chug along nicely, as they have been.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Anyone who's been a systems administrator for many years has probably dealt with Novell at one point or another in their career. Before Windows NT came on the scene, NetWare was pretty much THE PC file-and-print server solution. I remember one of the good things about it was that it was lightweight - command line UI, simple admin tools. Microsoft brought back this idea of command-line-only server consoles with Windows Server Core in the last version. Novell also has some pretty neat tools like ZenWorks. That said, it's interesting to see this potential deal on the table. Even 10 years ago, you'd never see Novell ready to throw in the towel.
I wonder why their acquisition of SuSE and the interoperability initiative with Microsoft didn't change their fortunes...they had a good plan for migrating all their NetWare customers to Linux. I know NetWare is still heavily used in European companies and in the health care sector, so you would think they have a willing customer base to pay the bills with. I guess they couldn't compete with Red Hat for distirbutions and IBM for support services in the Linux world.
It's a good lesson though -- no matter how much of a market dominator you are, you're always a few steps away from being destroyed.
Wow. Daryll McBride vs. Chuck Norris.
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
It is like I have been saying for years...Wall Street is just Las Vegas with better clothes....a vulture comes in, and day traders, the boils on the ass of society, go apeshit and start buying, driving up the price. It is thanks to this kind of stupidity that companies only think short term now and let their assets go to pot. It is the whole "screw everything but the quarterly report!" that has caused so much of this country to fall apart. If a company could increase the quarterly by burning the company for the insurance the day traders would be all for it. It is nothing but legalized gambling for those that aren't inside traders.
As for TFA? My guess is the raiders want to drain the coffers and spin off Groupwise and a few other assets to make a quick buck. There are enough Groupwise customers out there that it could make them a quick buck, hence the offer. The only question is will they pull a Yang and get greedy and price themselves right out of the offer with poison pills and demands for crazy money. Either way their stock will probably hit the basement if the deal doesn't go through, as the day traders follow the herd to the next deal.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.