As for Attachmate, the company was known early on for its terminal emulation software and more recently has expanded into management software, with buyouts of companies such as NetIQ and OnDemand Software. Attachmate is owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo.

Attachmate plans to operate Novell as two business units: One focused on Novell’s management technologies, such as its recently , and the other focused on its SuSE Linux offerings.

Novell was started  in 1979, just three years before Attachmate was founded. , sometimes called “the Father of Networking,” led Novell during its glory years in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, until . 

In recent years, the financially-strapped Novell put aside its past differences with Microsoft and partnered with the company on a number of fronts. designed to make managing mixed Windows and Linux environments easier, but that rubbed many in the open source community the wrong way. 

in Network World's Data Center section.