Novell to Acquire Platespin for 205M

More purchases and conglomeration on the way this year.

The buzz at VMworld Europe, before it has even started, is that Novell is to purchase Canadian data center management software company Platespin. Novell has now posted the news on their site, and many are scrambling to figure out where this will lead them as the software is very popular in the VM market. (UPDATE: Platespin have posted their announcement regarding the Novell acquisition as well)
Novell is starting to grow again: it now owns SuSE Linux, Ximian (original makers of Gnome), and just recently purchased open colaboration vendor SiteScape.

If you’d like more info about the acquisition, feel free to register for the Novell-Platespin webinar.

From the Platespin announcement:

On February 25, 2008, Novell announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd. The combination of Novell’s platform and automation management with PlateSpin’s leading solutions for workload relocation, protection and provisioning will give customers the agility to cross physical and virtual boundaries so IT can work together. Both organizations are focused on helping customers maximize the strategic value of the heterogeneous data center. Novell and PlateSpin will deliver products for complete workload lifecycle management and optimization for Linux, UNIX, and Windows operating systems in the physical and virtual data center. Below you will find details about the acquisition and what it means to current and future PlateSpin customers and partners.

From the Novell announcement:

The acquisition of PlateSpin will allow Novell to offer customers a full solution stack with a powerful virtualization platform and a best-in-class heterogeneous management solution. Together, Novell and PlateSpin will solve many of the data center challenges that customers face today, including:

• Relocation: PlateSpin provides a completely integrated product suite that automates the assessment and migration phases of data center initiatives, like server consolidation, data center relocation and hardware upgrades, to help customers reduce costs, power consumption and space in the data center.
• Protection: PlateSpin’s disaster recovery solutions offer affordable workload protection that leverages virtualization technology to protect both physical and virtual servers in the data center, for improved security and business continuity.
• Provisioning: Using PlateSpin’s technologies, customers will have a single approach to imaging and configuring physical and virtual workloads regardless of platform. This eliminates the manual install process and dramatically reduces the time to provision new server workloads. It will also enable customers to address changing resource requirements at peak demand times as well as in test lab scenarios.
• Optimization and Management: Novell and PlateSpin optimize the balance between physical and virtual infrastructure by automatically monitoring and making infrastructure adjustments based on server availability and workload demand. By automating the process and increasing the visibility into how workloads use physical and virtual resources over time, customers will be able to increase server utilization and optimize their data centers by better addressing common workload movement challenges.

The acquisition of PlateSpin will enable the heterogeneous data center with support for leading operating systems and virtual platforms. It will also further enhance Novell’s leadership in open source virtualization by providing tools that easily enable customers to move physical workloads to Xen*-based virtual machines running on SUSE® Linux Enterprise as well as other virtual platforms provided by VMware*, Citrix*, Microsoft* and others.

Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell, said, “The PlateSpin acquisition will be a cornerstone of our two-pronged enterprise Linux and IT management software strategy. With the addition of the PlateSpin product portfolio, Novell will be uniquely positioned to deliver the next generation infrastructure software that is at the core of the data center. 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, “PlateSpin’s ability to manage workloads is unparalleled and is an essential part of making the data center truly respond to the needs of the business. Combined with ZENworks Orchestrator and virtualization from Novell, we are very excited about the synergies that this acquisition will give to customers.”