The Attachmate Group, Inc. was a privately held software holding company based in

Houston, Texas Houston ( ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas and in the Southern United States. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the county seat, seat of ...

in the United States. The major companies held by the group were Attachmate, NetIQ,

Novell Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...

, and SUSE. Attachmate was owned by Wizard Parent LLC—an investment group consisting of Elliott Management Corporation,

Francisco Partners Francisco Partners Management, L.P., doing business as Francisco Partners, is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. It was founded in August 1999 and based in ...

Golden Gate Capital Golden Gate Capital is an American private equity firm based in San Francisco. The firm makes investments in a number of select industries, including technology, financial services, retail and industrial, through leveraged buyout transactions, as ...

, and Thoma Cressey Bravo.

History

WRQ and Formation

In 1981, Doug Walker, Mike Richer and Marty Quinn founded Walker, Richer & Quinn (WRQ) to integrate microcomputers with existing IT environments. The company set its sights on the Hewlett-Packard market, launching the first commercially viable

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote term ...

for the

HP 3000 The HP 3000 series is a family of 16-bit computing, 16-bit and 32-bit computing, 32-bit minicomputers from Hewlett-Packard. It was designed to be the first minicomputer with full support for time-sharing in the hardware and the operating system, ...

. (Two subsidiaries, Express Metrix and NetMotion Wireless, had been spun off by WRQ in 2000 and 2001, respectively, and continued to operate successfully for years to come.) After buying both WRQ, Inc. and Attachmate Corporation, who had been long-time competitors in the host emulation business, the private equity firms announced that the companies would be merged. On June 1, 2005, the deal closed, and it was revealed that the two companies, merged into one, would be named AttachmateWRQ. In June 2005, shortly after the merger was made official, AttachmateWRQ announced that its corporate headquarters would be located in WRQ's Seattle, Washington location.

NetIQ

NetIQ, founded in 1995 by Ching-Fa Hwang, Her-daw Che, Hon Wong, Ken Prayoon Cheng and Thomas R. Kemp, was a company that provided

systems management Systems management is enterprise-wide System administration, administration of distributed systems including (and commonly in practice) computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunic ...

and

security management Security management is the identification of an organization's assets i.e. including people, buildings, machines, systems and information assets, followed by the development, documentation, and implementation of policies and procedures for pr ...

software. Their products included AppManager and Security Manager. On April 27, 2006, AttachmateWRQ announced an agreement to acquire NetIQ On July 5, 2006, both companies released a press release announcing the closing of the deal. The new company would do business under the name Attachmate Corporation.

OnDemand

In 2006 AttachmateWRQ acquired OnDemand Software, developer of WinINSTALL, a product similar to AttachmateWRQ's existing NetWizard product. Two years later Scalable Software acquired the WinINSTALL business unit (substantially all assets of the former OnDemand) from Attachmate.

Wollongong

Later, the company also acquired The Wollongong Group (makers of Pathway TCP and Emissary).

Novell

In 2011 Attachmate acquired

, Inc and let go hundreds of Novell employees. At this point the overseeing entity become known as The Attachmate Group. Novell subsequently operated as two separate business units under the Novell and SUSE brand names and joined Attachmate and NetIQ as holdings of The Attachmate Group. Certain

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, co ...

assets are planned to be sold to CPTN Holdings, a consortium of companies led by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Acquisition by Micro Focus

On 15 September 2014, the British firm

Micro Focus International Micro Focus International plc was a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provided software and consultancy. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange and t ...

announced that it would acquire the Attachmate Group for in shares, and Attachmate Group announced entering into a definitive agreement to merge with Micro Focus, with transaction to be closed in 2014-11-03. Wizard Parent LLC was estimated to hold a 40% stake in Micro Focus following the acquisition. In 2014-11-05, Micro Focus International announced the completion of its merger with the Attachmate Group. In 2015-04-05, Micro Focus announced the completion of integrating Attachmate Group of companies that had been merged in 2014-11-20. During the integration period, the affected companies had been merged into a single organization. In the announced reorganization, NetIQ and Novell products would be part of Micro Focus portfolio.Attachmate is now part of Micro Focus
/ref> SUSE was sold to

EQT AB EQT AB is a Swedish global investment organization founded in 1994. Its funds invest in private equity (EQT Private Capital Europe & North America), infrastructure (EQT Infrastructure), real estate (EQT Real Estate), growth equity, and ventur ...

in 2019.

References

External links

The Attachmate Group, Inc.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Attachmate Group, The OpenText 2014 mergers and acquisitions Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Companies based in Houston Micro Focus International Software companies based in Texas Software companies established in 2005 Defunct software companies of the United States