The paper said the world’s No. 2 maker of the open source Linux operating system will sell itself in two parts and cited unnamed sources close to the deal.
The report said a strategic buyer will acquire the company’s Linux business and a private-equity firm will buy the rest.
The talks were at a sensitive stage and the deal might still fall apart, the paper said, adding that both deals were expected to close simultaneously.
Darn, just when I was starting to get into openSUSE!
I’m not sure what the term “strategic buyer” means in this case, but it has my curiosity peaked.
This one sounds a little more plausible, at least with maintaining the Linux business portion which is one of their shining stars. And of course there will be speculation as to who this “strategic buyer” is that nobody will be able to answer until the deal is done it seems.
A strategic buyer refers to a corporation or an individual that wishes to acquire a business or IP to bolster their own already existing line up.
For example if Hewlett Packard were to buy SUSE business portion, they would be a strategic buyer because they would integrate that OS into the mainframe/server/desktop line up and thus bolster their offering thus offering a tied in hardware and software to offer a complete package.
A type of buyer in an acquisition that has a specific reason for wanting to purchase the company. Strategic buyers look for companies that will create a synergy with their existing businesses.
Maybe somebody like VMWare seeking expansion, who’s existing products would be nicely complimented by Linux?
It needs another source of income and SUSE is doing fine for Novell; the problems have come because SUSE’s increased income hasn’t matched the declines in Novell’s earlier business. Bear in mind that SUSE is the dominant enterprise Linux distribution on supercomputers as well as in many parts of the world outside North America.
As bigger players move into virtualization, VMWare is in danger losing its status and market share. Having a product like SUSE to compliment their existing line would make them more competitive.
As I like the SLED/SLES products in addition to OpenSUSE … a sale to VMWare would be welcome news. Novell has not done anything other than backroom deals successfully for over two decades. I visited the Novell website earlier today; I was curious to see if they had any products. Most of it looks like junk, stuff that could be better accomplished with some clever perl scripting. I figure it’s only a matter of time before they ruin SuSE. As an IT professional, I would GREATLY PREFER to conduct business with anyone other than Novell.
Im not to sure about the market share part, but hey it would be great . I am sick of vcenter v(*insert product here) only running on windows clients and servers likewise, IIS , AD (not really ldap conform although it has gotten better). Imho I really think this has to with certain upper management from MS going to vmware (One hand washes the other). ESX is really the only thing still linux. Maybe we can finally have vsphere completely on linux (in this case suse) and a native vcenter client for linux.
>
> chief_sealth;2223178 Wrote:
>> As bigger players move into virtualization, VMWare is in danger losing
>> its status and market share. Having a product like SUSE to compliment
>> their existing line would make them more competitive.
>
> Im not to sure about the market share part, but hey it would be great .
> I am sick of vcenter v(*insert product here) only running on windows
> clients and servers likewise, IIS , AD (not really ldap conform although
> it has gotten better). Imho I really think this has to with certain
> upper management from MS going to vmware (One hand washes the other).
> ESX is really the only thing still linux. Maybe we can finally have
> vsphere completely on linux (in this case suse) and a native vcenter
> client for linux.
ESX/ESXi is an operating system (mostly written in assembler I believe). In
ESX, there is a Dom0 like machine based off RHEL (currently) that runs. It
can be used to get a glimpse into the ESX OS similar to how Dom0 works for
Xen (which is also an OS).
Will we WANT a hypervisor built ON TOP of Linux?.. no… but with that
said, there IS kvm which is essentially that. The problem is that the
hypervisor needs to be a hypervisor… I think the temptation with kvm is
trying to do risky things on the OS that IS the hypervisor. Not
recommended.
Even Red Hat’s RHEV (Qumranet) hides the underlying hypervisor version of
Linux (and it REALLY hides it btw), forcing you to talk to it via a
proprietary protocol from a .NET client.
Kvm WILL become popular. RHEV actually goes a long way to SLOWING down the
adoption of kvm in preference to their proprietary modified kvm.
VMware will live for quite some time. Kvm can’t run everything, however, we
are starting to see some restrictions now in VMware… so maybe VMware will
self destruct (not sure). Right now, VMware supports probably 3-4x the
number of virtual guest types as Xen or kvm (RHEV is even more restrictive).
If all guests are Linux… then its your choice… VMware is probably the
poorest performance wise for handling all linux guests. So… if all Linux,
look at Xen and/or kvm (and RHEV if you like lock in). Xen vs kvm… it’s
mixed bag. Better paravirtualization support is coming to kvm… and so, in
the future, I think it will have the upper hand (again, if all guests are
Linux).
