Attachmates eyes cloud customers for Suse

InfoWorld - Having closed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Novell, Attachmate now is eyeing cloud service providers as potential customers for the company's newly acquired Suse Linux platform. The company also plans to continue promoting Suse for deployment on mainframes and as a Unix replacement.

In an interview on Wednesday afternoon, Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn noted Suse would be its own separate business unit under the Attachmate umbrella, as would Novell. "We're making Suse its own business unit so it'll be on par with the other three business units." The other two include the Attachmate and NetIQ business units, all under the auspices of the Attachmate Group.

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"Basically, for the service providers and enterprises that are building out the cloud environments, we think we've got a terrific solution for them," Hawn said. Asked about any new features planned for Suse Linux, Hawn said he had nothing specific to say yet but that announcements would be made in coming weeks and months.

Attachmate also takes control over Novell's Mono business, which has placed Microsoft software development technologies available on non-Windows platforms, such as Linux. The company's Moonlight version of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet plugin platform falls under the Mono domain. Hawn was not yet ready to comment on any development plans for Mono. "I haven't sorted through all of that yet."

For legacy Novell Netware customers, Attachmate expects to restore commitments to support Netware versions in which support was due to be discontinued. "Our philosophy is not to force customers to move from anything," Hawn said. Netware, he said, has "still got a very large, a very loyal installed base and we intend to continue to focus on meeting their needs whether that's in additional offerings on the roadmap, additional support offerings and the like."

"We are not discontinuing any products," Hawn said. Existing Novell roadmaps remain intact, he said. Attachmate announced its Novell acquisition in November.  

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