Novell eyes up Platespin

Software vendor enters into definitive agreement to acqure data centre player

Novellhas entered into a definitive agreement to acquire data centre specialist PlateSpin for $205m.

The acquisition, which is expected to close in Novell's second fiscal quarter, will enable the combined firm to provide the only offering that delivers business critical services across both physical and virtual infrastructures, according to Novell.

Ron Hovsepian, chief executive of Novell, said: "The PlateSpin acquisition will be a cornerstone of our two-pronged enterprise Linux and IT management software strategy. With the addition of the PlateSpin product portfolio, Novell will be positioned to deliver the next generation infrastructure software that is at the core of the data centre.

"Together, we will have the most comprehensive workload management solution that allows customers to monitor and analyse what to virtualise, provide the tools to seamlessly virtualise and unvirtualise workloads, automate the management of workloads, and provide the leading open source platform from which to run virtualised work."

Stephen Pollack, founder of PlateSpin, said, "PlateSpin's ability to manage workloads is unparalleled and is an essential part of making the data centre truly respond to the needs of the business. Combined with ZENworks Orchestrator and virtualisation from Novell, we are very excited about the synergies that this acquisition will give to customers."

Terry Walby, director datacentre solutions, at Computacenter welcomed the move.

"It will be interesting to see what happens, because we partner with both PlateSpin and Novell. It is a positive announcement as far as we are concerned, " he said.