Mainframe 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.
