Novell (News - Alert) Inc. is all set to acquire PlateSpin Ltd., a Toronto-based virtualization-optimization company, in a friendly takeover deal worth US$205-million in cash.
 
PlateSpin offers solutions for the management of heterogeneous workloads that encapsulate data, applications and operating systems residing on a physical or virtual host.
 
The acquisition of PlateSpin is expected to enable the heterogeneous data center with support for operating systems and virtual platforms. Also, it is expected to enhance Novell's open source virtualization solution by providing tools that enable customers to move physical workloads to Xen based virtual machines running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, and other virtual platforms provided by VMware, Citrix, Microsoft (News - Alert) and others.
 
According to Novell, by acquiring PlateSpin it will deliver support for mixed infrastructure environments offering products for complete workload lifecycle management and optimization for Linux, UNIX and Windows operating systems in the physical and virtual data center.
 
In addition, the acquisition of PlateSpin will also allow Novell to offer customers a full solution stack with a virtualization platform and a heterogeneous management solution.
 
Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO at Novell, said in a statement, “The PlateSpin acquisition will be a cornerstone of our two-pronged enterprise Linux and IT management software strategy.”
 
He believes that with the addition of the PlateSpin product portfolio, Novell will be positioned to deliver the next generation infrastructure software that is at the core of the data center.
 
He added: “Together, we will have the most comprehensive workload management solution that allows customers to monitor and analyze what to virtualize, provide the tools to seamlessly virtualize and unvirtualize workloads, automate the management of workloads, and provide the leading open source platform from which to run virtualized work.”
 
Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin, said that combined with ZENworks Orchestrator and virtualization from Novell, “we are very excited about the synergies that this acquisition will give to customers.”
 
The acquisition is expected to close during Novell's second fiscal quarter 2008 subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions. PlateSpin will be integrated into Novell's Systems and Resource Management business unit.
 
According to Novell, as part of this business unit, PlateSpin will continue to develop and market its solutions to a global customer base. This is expected to be done through the continued operation of PlateSpin’s Toronto facility as well as through a combination of PlateSpin and Novell offices and facilities around the globe.
 
 
Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anshu’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
 
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