Hedge Fund Offers $2 Billion For Novell 144
CWmike writes "A hedge fund that is already one of Novell's largest shareholders offered on Tuesday to acquire the struggling, cash-rich enterprise software maker for $2 billion. The unsolicited offer, from New York-based Elliot Associates L.P., is for $5.75 per share in cash, a dollar per share more than Novell's closing price Tuesday of $4.75. The offer caused Novell's stock to leap 29% to $6.15 in after-hours trading. Because Novell is so cash-rich — it had $991 million in cash and equivalents at the end of January (PDF) — Elliott says the deal values Novell as an enterprise alone at about $1 billion."
Re:It's been a while, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
beyond that norton is not novell, novell actually has a pretty strong enterprise presence. A hedge fund buying novell is a really bad sign, to be honest. Novell is doing fine. Them trying to label Novell as unsuccessful is basically a flat out BS.
What I suspect this means is that someone's trying to stop Novell before the Novell v. SCO case comes around. They're trying to see if the Novell board is greedy enough to do it, and I suspect they aren't and neither are the shareholders.
A hedge taking over a company if that hedge has no experience managing in the sector of the company they're taking basically means they're going to tack on association/management fees onto novell and dump them to someone else.
Re:Already Under Investigation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I think I know what they're going to do with it (Score:4, Interesting)
Eh, the story is about Novell, and nobody has used the word Microsoft and Linux yet, and they usually go together with 'Novell'...
Oh, and the SCO vs Novell trial is still on the 'todo list' for the courts...
Who knows what is really going on here... People tend to think long and hard before offering to spend $2B of their own money...
I hope nothing substantial changes (Score:4, Interesting)
Novell has been taking good care of Suse Linux. Since Novell bought them, they continued working on what I think is the best Linux distro, without hindrance, boosted their marketshare and helped in giving Linux a corporate-friendly image. I hope the new owners of Novell (should such takeover really take place) will have a hands-off approach and let things chug along nicely, as they have been.
Interesting how fortunes turn (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who's been a systems administrator for many years has probably dealt with Novell at one point or another in their career. Before Windows NT came on the scene, NetWare was pretty much THE PC file-and-print server solution. I remember one of the good things about it was that it was lightweight - command line UI, simple admin tools. Microsoft brought back this idea of command-line-only server consoles with Windows Server Core in the last version. Novell also has some pretty neat tools like ZenWorks. That said, it's interesting to see this potential deal on the table. Even 10 years ago, you'd never see Novell ready to throw in the towel.
I wonder why their acquisition of SuSE and the interoperability initiative with Microsoft didn't change their fortunes...they had a good plan for migrating all their NetWare customers to Linux. I know NetWare is still heavily used in European companies and in the health care sector, so you would think they have a willing customer base to pay the bills with. I guess they couldn't compete with Red Hat for distirbutions and IBM for support services in the Linux world.
It's a good lesson though -- no matter how much of a market dominator you are, you're always a few steps away from being destroyed.
Re:It's been a while, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow. Daryll McBride vs. Chuck Norris. [youtube.com]
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)