A week after the Attachmate and Novell deal finalized, many Novell employees in Provo, UT, got pink slips. Salt Lake City’s KSL news reported that hundreds of employees were laid off. A number of Novell executives have also left the company including Ron Hovsepian, Dana Russell, John Dragoon, Colleen O’Keefe, Joseph Wagner, Russell Poole, Scott Semel, Jim Ebzery, Maarten Koster, Tim Wolfe, Jose Almandoz, Ryan Richards, Willard Smith, Markus Rex and Javier Colado.
Attachmate has also announced the creation of four business units going forward.
- Attachmate: Includes solutions for host connectivity, legacy modernization, managed file transfer, and enterprise fraud management. This portfolio and leadership remains unchanged as a result of the combination and will continue to be headquartered in Seattle, Wash.
- NetIQ: Solutions from NetIQ will be combined with the identity, security and data center management solutions (with the exception of SUSE) from Novell. Leadership and location in Houston, TX, remains unchanged.
- Novell: The Novell business unit will focus on the products and solutions that were previously referred to as End User Computing. This includes solutions from both collaboration and endpoint management. Bob Flynn will lead this business unit as President and General Manager in addition to leading the Attachmate business unit. Operations will be headquartered in Provo, UT.
- SUSE: Established as its own dedicated business unit under Nils Brauckmann in Nuremberg, Germany, with the charge to “unleash the potential of SUSE on the market in ways that matter to both the community and customers.”
Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols has tried to find out what’s happening to Mono, but he received a statement from Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn that the new SUSE business unit will be in charge of deciding how that project progresses. Meanwhile, Mono’s leader, Miguel de Icaza seemed surprised on Twitter at the rumors of his demise.
With all of this unrest, others are speculating that Attachmate will sell off SUSE, which seems supported by the separation of business unit strategy that Attachmate has decided upon.
We will continue to follow this news as it breaks, and are interested in hearing from any former Novell employees (on or off the record) to get a better idea of how these developments are going to affect enterprise customers and the Linux landscape. Leave comments below or contact us.
