Micro Focus Acquiring Attachmate for $2.3B
Micro Focus announced today its intention to acquire privately-held Attachmate in a deal valued at approximately $2.3 billion.
The deal includes the issuance of 86.60 million shares of Micro Focus to Attachmate's parent company, Wizard Parent LLC. Micro Focus states that the value of the granted shares is approximately $1.19 billion. Micro Focus also will take on Attachmate's net debt of $1.17 billion.
Micro Focus is an enterprise application modernization and testing software vendor with a long list of products in its portfolio. The company's core products include its Visual COBOL, Enterprise Analyzer and Enterprise Developer platforms.
Attachmate is an amalgam of multiple companies, including a namesake company that provides enterprise file share and legacy application management products, and the NetIQ business for networking application visibility software. Attachmate also owns Novell, which it acquired in a $2.2 billion deal in 2011. Following the acquisition of Novell, Attachmate spun out SUSE Linux as its own operating division.
“The Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell and SUSE brands will continue forward and are a critical part of the organizational and go-to-market strategy going forward,” Jeff Hawn, chairman and chief executive officer of the Attachmate Group, wrote in an email to Enterprise Apps Today.
While there might be opportunities for integration between Attachmate's technology and the Micro Focus portfolio, that's not the focus today.
“At this time the two companies are focused on closing the deal and on their respective existing roadmaps and are operating business as usual,” Hawn said.
After the acquisition is complete, the combined company will have 4,500 employees and combined revenues of approximately $1.4 billion.
Kevin Loosemore, executive chairman of Micro Focus, sees a compelling rationale behind bringing the two companies together.
“Both companies are well established enterprise software vendors operating at a global scale with a presence in all significant international markets,” Loosemore said in a statement. “Both hold a portfolio of software solutions which address specific aspects of the infrastructure software requirements of a substantial installed base of large enterprise customers, with no material customer concentration or direct overlap.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Apps Today and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
