Novell Buying PlateSpin

Novell has agreed to acquire PlateSpin Ltd., a Toronto-based server virtualization company, for $205 million in cash. PlateSpin had raised around $17 million in VC funding since 2001, from firms like Insight Capital Partners, Intel Capital, CastleHill Ventures, Raza Venture Fund and VentureLink Holdings.

PRESS RELEASE

Novell today announced it 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 tools 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.”

Optimizing the Data Center
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.