Novell brand to become British-owned
London-listed Micro Focus to acquire Novell and SUSE owner Attachmate Group in £730m deal
British enterprise software vendor Micro Focus is set to gobble Novell parent Attachmate Group in a reverse takeover.
London-listed Micro Focus announced yesterday it will issue 86.6 million shares to Attachmate's parent, Wizard, in exchange for a 40 per cent stake in the enlarged firm. This values Attachmate at $1.18bn (£729.6m,) although factoring in Attachmate's net debt of $1.17bn the transaction carries an enterprise value of $2.35bn.
Houston-based Attachmate operates four principal product portfolios: terminal emulation outfit Attachmate; identity and access management specialist NetIQ; workspace management vendor Novell; and Linux ace SUSE.
Attachmate, which is backed by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital, Elliott Management and Thoma Bravo, paid $2.2bn for Novell - including SUSE - back in 2010. Attachmate acquired NetIQ in 2006 for $496m.
Micro Focus executive chairman Kevin Loosemore hailed the merger as a "rare opportunity to achieve a significant increase in the scale and breadth of Micro Focus".
"There is compelling rationale behind this merger," Loosemore said.
The duo claim together they will be a top-three player in off-mainframe COBOL, mainframe modernisation, host connectivity and Linux operating systems and will boast combined revenues of $1.4bn.
"Both companies are well established enterprise software vendors operating at a global scale with a presence in all significant international markets," said Loosemore.
"Both hold a portfolio of software solutions which address specific aspects of the infrastructure software requirements of a substantial installed base of large enterprise customers, with no material customer concentration or direct overlap. And both Attachmate and Micro Focus' respective product groups are predominantly mature solution sets which are embedded within the IT infrastructures of large corporate customers."
The transaction is set to close on 3 November.