Tag: Attachmate

British Micro Focus merges with Attachmate

Merge-AheadMainframe software outfit Micro Focus has started proceedings to merge with Attachmate, owners of Novell and Suse Linux, for approximately US$1.2 billion.

The combined company should have yearly revenue of $1.4 billion, with more than 4,500 employees and more than 30,000 customers, Micro Focus said.

Analysts say that it is a good merger as both are established enterprise software vendors with global marketing reach and little overlap in either products or customers.

Attachmate hit the headlines in 2011 when it bought enterprise software vendor Novell in 2011 for $2.2 billion.

Attachmate’s parent company, Wizard Parent, will exchange with Micro Focus all of Attachmate’s 86 million public shares, traded on the London Stock Exchange and now worth about £729.6 million ($1.18 billion), for approximately 40 percent of shares in the combined company.

Based in Houston, the Attachmate Group controls what is left of Novell’s employee productivity, printing and networking software. It also has Attachmate’s own line of advanced software for terminal emulation, legacy modernization and managed file transfer and Suse, a line of enterprise Linux and Linux-based cloud software that was part of the Novell acquisition.  Also from its Novell buy out it controls NetIQ which is a line of identity, access and security management software.

Micro Focus is based in Newbury and sells software products for the enterprise, including an IBM mainframe modernisation software, COBOL development kits and a range of testing tools.

Micro Focus expects the deal to close by November.

IT should use XP migration to boost infrastructure

framedwindowsWith support for Windows XP just around the corner, yet another company is shouting that businesses must have no illusions: sticking with unsupported software could be catastrophic.

Attachmate’s Barry Davis, UK sales director, said in a statement that businesses will be and should be migrating – and when they do they should take the migration as an incentive to evaluate security vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. “They can also reconcile and shrink the sprawl to a level their current IT staff can support,” Davis said.

Attachmate pointed out Accenture research that claims half of UK IT departments have no strategy for applications current running on Windows XP. And it warns that if businesses continue to run terminal emulators made for XP after upgrading, they could still be open to vulnerabilities.

“This is an opportunity to invest in future proofing, streamlining desktop emulation and mainframe access,” Davis said.

Attachmate advises businesses to take step by step best practice approaches to migration, based on standardisation, and starting with an inventory check to get all the data in place.