* Identity guru says Novell is most likely to be sold in pieces
Just when I thought that the water cooler chat about someone acquiring Novell had died down, up steps John Thompson to revive the speculation.
Thompson, the chairman and CEO of PC management firm Symantec (“Symantec is the world leader in providing solutions to help individuals and enterprises assure the security, availability, and integrity of their information,” according to their Web site), mentioned in his keynote at the company’s annual Vision conference in San Francisco last week that, “We are not at this moment in the identity management business, but it is an area of great interest to our company.”
Well.
My old friend and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Identity guru Vikas Mahajan was quick off the mark with what appears to be a pretty good scenario. Vikas dropped me a note saying that it would appear that no one would want Novell as a whole because the company doesn’t fit well with any one other vendor’s needs. His conclusion? “Chop it up and sell it in pieces to the highest bidders.”
Here’s his description of how that could play out.
“Symantec is saying they want to get into identity management, but most of the independent players with any market share have been gobbled up. And the only company I know with a for sale sign is Novell (I thinks its a question of when, not if). But I don’t think Symantec wants anything to do with the Operating system or messaging business. So I could see Novell getting chopped up into perhaps 3 companies.” He then outlines the three pieces.
1. SuSE Linux – Spin it off and sell it to Oracle. Novell can fetch a very decent price for it now. Take all the open source stuff like iFolder, hula, etc, too.
2. Identity management, security products and ZENworks – Sell these pieces to Symantec. Everything here is complementary to Symantec, gives them strong user base and very complete and respected products. I think Novell can get a handsome premium here. eDirectory, IDM, iChain, SecureLogin, e-Security, ZEN Suite, the whole nine-yards (except maybe Bordermanager, which they can dump or throw in with the NetWare spinoff)
3. NetWare and GroupWise – Spin off as their own company, let them be free to grow and evolve. These are legacy, proprietary software products with good-sized installed bases and loyal customers. There is no reason they can’t continue to succeed with the right leadership, marketing and R&D resources.
His projection of the sale is that “Instead of Novell going for about $10 a share as a whole company, they can probably get $6 to $8 a share for Linux and identity management and give shares in the new NetWare company to the shareholders.”
Mahajan has always been a sensible guy, and that plan makes a lot of sense to me. Especially as it sees NetWare continuing in the hands of people who would pay attention to it.
