Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Novell buys business software firm Managed Objects

By Mass High Tech Staff

Novell Inc. has reached an agreement to acquire Managed Objects Inc., a Virginia-based business service management company.
 
The acquisition is scheduled to close during the first quarter of 2009, but no financial details of the deal were disclosed.

The acquisition will extend Waltham-based Novell’s portfolio of data center solutions by adding tools designed to provide a unified view of information and workloads. The Managed Objects products complement and extend Novell’s existing workload management and virtualization solutions by adding service modeling, configuration management data base technology, advanced analytics and Web 2.0-based visualization technology, company officials said.

Managed Objects, which is privately held, was founded in 1997. The company is headquartered in McLean, Va., and operates offices in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta and Houston. Its European operations are headquartered in London, and Asia-Pacific operations are in Singapore.

In February, Novell reached an agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd., a Toronto-based maker of server-virtualization software, for $205 million, and it bought Maynard-based open-source collaboration software maker SiteScape Inc. for an undisclosed amount.

Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL), which was founded in 1983, employs more than 5,000 workers. For 2007, the company reported a loss of $44.5 million, while bringing in revenue of $932.5 million.