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Novell Shareholders Approve Attachmate Deal

By Pamela Jones et al.

Novell has put out a press release announcing that the shareholders have approved the sale to Attachmate. There's also an 8K filing with the SEC. Here's how it strangely describes itself in the press release: "a leader in intelligent workload management". Would those be the first words you'd think of to describe Novell? So the morph is under way.

A year ago, Novell described itself like this:

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.

Anyway, most of the shareholders approved it, or 66%, but the US Department of Justice and the German antitrust regulatory body still have to give their approval of the patent deal. As the press release puts it, "The patent sale to CPTN remains subject to the satisfaction or waiver of closing conditions, including receipt of antitrust approval in the United States and Germany." Those investigations are still going on. Novell says it's "in the process of gathering information to respond" to the DOJ's second request, so this isn't going to close overnight, I gather.

Full post as published by Groklaw on February 19, 2011 (boomark / email).