Hedge fund Elliot Associates has made a bid to acquire software vendor Novell. In a public letter to the company's board of directors, the hedge fund offered $5.75 per share (a 49 percent premium), placing Novell's value at $2 billion dollars. Elliot Associates is already one of the largest institutional shareholders of Novell, with roughly 8.5 percent of the company's stock.
Novell's NetWare platform was once a widely-used server operating system, but its popularity swiftly declined with the emergence of Linux. Novell responded to that trend by entering the Linux market itself, acquiring Ximian and SuSE in 2003. Novell has made significant inroads in the Linux space, but has had difficulty competing with Red Hat on the server side. Although Novell is still an active contributor to Linux desktop and server technologies, the company is gradually shifting its focus towards development tools—particularly the Mono framework, which has been modestly successful and is attracting a growing audience of commercial software developers due its suitability for mobile uses and embedding.
In the public letter to Novell's board of directors, Elliot Associates portfolio manager Jesse A. Cohn describes Novell's attempts at diversification as "unsuccessful" and contends that the company's stock has underperformed. Elliot Associates believes that it can turn Novell around by restructuring the company to wring more value out of its useful technologies. The letter conveys a sense of urgency and uses the word "expedite" twice. It's pretty clear that they want this deal and they want to get the ball rolling as soon as possible.