VMware reportedly buying Novell’s Suse operating system

Rumors have been circulating for quite some time, so it seems safe to say that Novell is for sale. What’s interesting is that VMware could be one of the bidders.

Novell has pretty much been for sale the past six months or so. The New York Post first reported that a “strategic buyer” was going to acquire the Suse Linux portion of Novell’s business, but no buyer was named at the time. Later a Wall Street Journal article came out naming VMware as that strategic buyer. And while the claims about a VMware purchase remain unconfirmed, many folks in the industry are jumping on the news.

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According to the WSJ article, Novell plans to sell itself off in pieces. VMware is said to be pursuing the Novell Suse Linux operating system part of the business, while Attachmate, a private-equity-backed software company, could end up buying some or all of the remaining assets, including the old NetWare network operating system.

The WSJ’s sources say the three companies are still discussing how to divide the sales force, as well as how to handle Novell’s patent portfolio and other intellectual properties. These complications are not only slowing down an official announcement, which reportedly could still be weeks away, but it could also cause the deal to ultimately break down.

VMware’s pursuit of Novell’s Suse Linux business should be considered a solid strategic play for the virtualization market leader. As the company continues to try and transition itself from a virtualization company to that of a cloud company, the acquisition should offer VMware a more complete cloud stack to answer its critics.

VMware has already expanded its software stack beyond that of the hypervisor. With acquisitions of SpringSource (a popular open source development framework) and Zimbra (a collaboration and email platform), as well as a key partnership with Salesforce.com under its belt, adding the Novell Suse operating system would go a long way to completing its software stack for running cloud services. The Novell Suse addition would also help VMware better compete against the growing challenges from Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat, all of which boast a deeper integration between the hypervisor itself and the OS. These competitors are pushing their own cloud computing strategies by laying claim to a complete vertical stack that also includes their own supported operating system — an area in cloud computing that VMware lacks.

VMware and Novell are certainly no strangers to one another. Earlier this month the companies said they would be expanding on a partnership first announced in June where VMware planned to standardize all of its virtual appliance-based product offerings on Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

The latest announcement brings Novell Suse and VMware vSphere even closer: Customers who purchase a VMware vSphere license and subscription will also receive a subscription for patches and updates to Suse Linux Enterprise Server for VMware at no additional cost. Additionally, VMware said it will offer the option to purchase technical support services for Suse Linux Enterprise Server for VMware to provide a more seamless support experience. The expanded collaboration between the companies was intended to provide customers the ability to port their Suse Linux-based workloads across the cloud and is a significant step in delivering the benefits of seamless cloud computing.

Beyond the Suse operating system, there haven’t been any indications what other parts of Novell’s business VMware might be interested in acquiring. Let’s not forget, Novell acquired long-time virtualization software management provider PlateSpin back in February of 2008, which helped to fill out Novell’s ZENworks management and orchestration solution. Popular PlateSpin technology includes such fan favorites as Forge, the company’s virtual data center in a box for disaster recovery purposes; Recon, the company’s virtual capacity management and consolidation planning software; and Migrate, software that provides anywhere to anywhere workload migration.

And last week Novell announced the availability of Novell Cloud Manager, a new solution to help customers create and securely manage a cloud computing environment that is an extension of their existing data center resources. The solution is designed to provide for heterogeneous support across all leading hypervisors, operating systems, and hardware platforms — but that can certainly be changed by VMware if they choose to acquire this technology as well.

With the competition from Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat, VMware is probably going to have to support Linux and make Suse its operating system of choice for its virtualization and cloud software stack. Offering an operating system and a vertical stack will be necessary to fend off similar offerings from its competitors. But this isn’t going to be a short-term fix, more like a long-term strategy in a much larger battle.

If the acquisition comes through, it’ll be interesting to see how VMware is going to handle Suse and, in the longer term, how they embrace open source software.

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