Psst. Wanna hear about Novell's secretive virtualization company buyout?

Novell in November quietly acquired a company whose resource virtualization software is being used to bolster the data center automation capabilities of Novell's ZENworks management package.

The company acquired RedMojo for $9.72 million, though chose not to make an official announcement at the time.

“RedMojo was not considered a material acquisition,” says Kerry Adorno, a Novell spokesperson. “The company provided some technology that combined with organic development from Novell has helped to strengthen the data center management offerings we announced in November.”

Novell cited the buyout in its quarterly report filed March 1.

RedMojo was founded in September 2003 as a grid company. The company transitioned to virtual machine management in late 2005. According to then CTO Paul Morgan, the name for the company was taken from an Austin Powers' movie -- "We put the 'mojo' back in the network."

RedMojo’s Matrix System technology performs data center resource virtualization. Through policies, IT managers use it to set service-level objectives and manage jobs and resource provisioning.

Novell has integrated RedMojo’s product into its ZENworks Orchestrator, which was announced in November. ZENworks Orchestration Server is a grid-based data center automation foundation that provides distributed job scheduling and workload management across server resources. The ZENworks suite of products accounts for 14% of Novell’s revenue.

Paul Morgan, CTO for RedMojo, has stayed on with Novell as a director of software engineering. He will be presenting several sessions on ZENworks Orchestrator at Novell’s annual user conference, BrainShare, next week.

Novell's last publicly announced acquisition was that of e-Security in April of 2006.