Novell set to purchase datacentre management vendor

Enterprise software vendor Novell announced yesterday it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire datacentre management vendor PlateSpin for $205 million. The deal is due to close in Q2 of Novell’s financial year at the end of April.

Novell chief executive and president, Ron Hovsepian said in a statement that acquiring PlateSpin would put Novell in a unique position to deliver next generation datacentres, "The PlateSpin acquisition will be a cornerstone of our two-pronged enterprise Linux and IT management software strategy."

PlateSpin chief technology officer Steven Pollock commented that PlateSpin always had an agnostic approach to firms’ virtualisation infrastructure and could work with Mac systems and using alternative Linux distributions such as Red Hat.

Novell senior vice president for systems and resource management (SRM) Joe Wagner said that PlateSpin, "Would be integrated into the SRM unit which I manage, but both partner programmes would continue to develop and market their solutions to their respective customer bases. PlateSpin's Toronto facility would continue to operate."

However, Quocirca service director for business process analysis Clive Longbottom has reservations about the deal, saying that PlateSpin runs the risk of being lost within Novell's portfolio, “Novell and marketing are two words that have never appeared in the same library, never mind the same book.”

PlateSpin has three products, one of which was a hardware appliance called Forge, due to be introduced into the EMEA region this week. The Forge disaster recovery appliance allows datacentre managers to protect and recover both physical and virtual server workloads in the event of unplanned downtime or even a site disaster.
The two software systems, PowerConvert and PowerRecon give firms the capacity to optimise datacentres through being able to 'drag and drop' workloads onto, physical or virtual hosts, as well as providing inventory and utilisation metrics useful for firms planning datacentre initiatives.

Longbottom pointed out that the company has great virtualisation technology but their offerings “would have been a good fit for someone like a BMC, IBM (Tivoli) or CA (Unicenter).

Novell hopes the acquisition will give them an advantage for firms running mixed environments and are aiming to offer, "Complete workload lifecycle management for Linux, Unix and Windows systems."