Novell Definitively Acquires Canadian Start-Up PlateSpin for $205 Million in Cash

Novell has entered into a definitive agreement to
acquire PlateSpin Ltd.

This acquisition will extend Novell’s leadership
position in the next-generation data center by providing the only
solution to dynamically deliver business critical services across both
physical and virtual infrastructures. PlateSpin offers extensive
solutions for the management of heterogeneous workloads that
encapsulate data, applications and operating systems residing on a
physical or virtual host. These solutions improve the speed and quality
of server consolidation, data center relocation and disaster recovery.
Novell and PlateSpin will deliver unparalleled 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. The combined
solutions will deliver superior value by helping customers reduce
costs, improve service levels and respond to fluctuating business
requirements.

“Flexible,
automated management products that fully leverage server resources and
allow the movement of workloads are necessary for optimizing the data
center,” said Stephen Elliot, research director, Enterprise Systems
Management Software and ITMS at IDC. “Over the next three years,
heterogeneous virtualization architectures will be the norm for most IT
organizations; as such they must purchase data center management
solutions that offer an ongoing opportunity for lowering operational
costs as well as integrating and managing VMs across both server and
storage infrastructures for greater control and visibility between
hardware and the virtual software tiers.”

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.”

Novell will acquire
PlateSpin for $205 million using current cash. 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. As part of this business unit, PlateSpin will
continue to develop and market its solutions to a global customer base.
This will 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.

Novell

PlateSpin Ltd.