Novell to Acquire Managed Objects

WALTHAM, Mass., Oct. 14 -- Novell today announced a definitive agreement to acquire the business service management leader Managed Objects. The acquisition will extend Novell's portfolio of data center solutions by adding tools to provide a unified view of all information and workloads. As a result, both IT and business managers will have improved visibility into how their information systems deliver business services across physical and virtual environments, so managers can make better decisions to ensure availability and quality of service while improving agility and lowering the total cost of data center management.

"The acquisition of Managed Objects by Novell illustrates Novell's commitment to an expanded management strategy and makes them a strong competitor in the service management market," said Tim Grieser, program vice president, enterprise system management Software, IDC. "Managed Objects is a recognized player in BSM and has a proven track record with some of the largest companies in the world. With Managed Objects, Novell can more easily have business conversations in the data center with CIO's, line of business managers, and key business stakeholders. This new service management focus represents a step in the right direction for Novell and adds significant credibility to Managed Objects customers that may have had concern about a smaller company."

The Managed Objects products complement and extend Novell's existing workload management and virtualization solutions by adding flexible service modeling, leading Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) technology, advanced analytics and unique Web 2.0-based visualization technology. Customers can extract IT configuration and workload information in near real-time into a robust CMDB, model how the IT configuration provides business services, and then generate visualizations and dashboards that dynamically show how IT aligns to business services. By providing a single view of data center workloads across any physical or virtual environment, system administrators can understand and respond to issues in a business context reactively, pro-actively, or automatically.

"This acquisition extends Novell's strategy of making IT work as one in the data center," said Joe Wagner, senior vice president of systems and resource management at Novell. "The Managed Objects products are very complementary to our existing management and virtualization capabilities. By adding the Managed Objects toolset to the Novell(R) portfolio of data center solutions, we are unique in providing technology-agnostic and proven cross-platform solutions that span both the physical and virtual worlds -- all in one unified view."

"Novell and Managed Objects are a natural fit because they share a common ideology for openness and vendor neutrality," said Siki Giunta, president and CEO of Managed Objects. "There is very little product overlap and tremendous synergy between the two companies and our respective technology, which is great news for our customers and the market at large."

Acquisition Overview

Novell will acquire Managed Objects for an undisclosed sum using current cash. The acquisition is expected to close during Novell's first fiscal quarter 2009 subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions. Managed Objects will be fully integrated into Novell's Systems and Resource Management business unit.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ:NOVL) delivers the best engineered, most interoperable Linux platform and a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit http://www.novell.com/.

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