Our well known good friend - Ken Muir did post a very interesting reply in the NGW-List regarding the Sitescape Acquisition:

 

This is a very important development in Novell’s collaboration strategy. It is much more than adding a solution to our product portfolio for our customer’s that satisfies their teaming and conferencing needs. It is more than a nice addition to our flagship, personal productivity tool, GroupWise.

- It shows the commitment of Novell to our customers for our collaboration products. (Put your money where your mouth is)…. As far as not buying it from the beginning, there are a lot of reasons why that didn’t happen. I can’t elaborate.

- MOMENTUM…. this commitment is a signal of the strength of the business. GroupWise grew 7% last year. This product has been building momentum for 6 quarters now. It is a very healthy business. When a product builds momentum, a company can increase it’s investment. New things can start to happen. New innovation for our customers in both the teaming products and GroupWise. This product and business is really taking off

- Executive visibility and increased press… Ron is very excited about the prospects of our collaboration products. I spent two days with him after GWAVACon a few weeks back as he talked to the press. Novell Teaming + Conferencing and GroupWise got a tremendous amount of air time. CxO level people see and hear this and realize the jewel they have in GroupWise and the next generation of complimentary collaboration tools.

- Customers see they now have an alternative to SharePoint at a lower cost, that is open source/open standards and enables them to build upon their previous investment in GroupWise.

- Now that Novell owns the Product, we can now form even closer relations with a very talented team at Sitescape.

The Workgroup leadership is doing a tremendous job and working very hard to meet the needs of our customers and partners. I enjoyed working with them as they drove this acquisition to completion.