"Novell may be one of those companies where the sum of the parts could be greater than the whole, under new leadership," said Rebecca Wettemann, the vice president of research for IT analyst firm Nucleus Research. The challenge, she said, is for Attachmate to "pull it all together and deliver the next generation of products."

"Novell has always had some strong technology and great research and development," Wettemann added. It has been less successful in "getting it from the lab to the desktop," she said.

Novell is best known for its NetWare network software, which was widely used through the mid-1980s and into the early 1990s but has since been largely succeeded by Internet-friendly networking technologies. In 2005, Novell replaced NetWare with its Open Enterprise Server.

The company had fielded a number of other products as well, with varied success. The company has long offered GroupWise, a collaboration product that "was far less expensive to support and administrate than Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes," Wettemann said. But Novell never gave GroupWise the marketing muscle it deserved, preferring instead to concentrate its efforts on the waning NetWare market, she said.