Additional thoughts on Novell acquisition of PlateSpin

After posting Novell acquires PlateSpin: Will everything fall to the floor? I had the chance to speak with Novell and PlateSpin once again. It is clear that the two companies had focused on different management technologies for virtual environments and that there where quite a number of opportunities for a merged organization to persue. If one takes the vision presented in the post, IBM announces the Z10: Is the mainframe still relevant?, the combined organizations  face a very large opportunity to help organizations through the process of evolution from having a datacenter that looks like a computer museum to one that is based upon a unified hardware architecture and a diverse software environment. That being said, there are still challenges ahead.

Integrating two formally independent organizations into a single unified oganization may be far more important that integrating several differrent lines of development. Different organizational cultures, different management styles and different approaches to addressing the needs of the market can all inhibit or totally disrupt the integration plans. After chatting for a while, it appears that the executive teams of both companies are well along the path of coming up with an integration plan that will make it possible for the best of PlateSpin's approach to be brought to bear on an expanded market opportunity.

We've agreed to get back together 6 months from now to look at the progress being made towards integration. We also agreed that there will be people that love the newly combined organizational environment and there will be those who leave because they don't. Over the next 6 months, it will just as important to see who stays and who leaves and how well the integration effort goes on the technology front.