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Novell Acquires SiteScape

There is some very exciting news in the Workgroup Business Unit. Novell announced the acquisition of SiteScape. For those that don’t know we OEMed with SiteScape to create Novell Teaming+Conferencing, which is all about team productivity as opposed to GroupWise’s individual productivity. This is a very strong statement to the market on our intentions in the collaboration space and I could not be more excited.

So what does this mean for GroupWise? Well, the fantastic work that the GroupWise team was doing meant that we initially embarked on the Teaming+Conferencing product, and that the value that GroupWise and T+C have demonstrated since that point means that Novell is ready to invest into collaboration at an even more significant level than they did before.

GroupWise has demonstrated growth over the last few quarters and we expect that trend to continue. GroupWise Bonsai is one of the most anticipated releases of GroupWise that the team can remember and it is a joy to demo at events like GWAVACon, as feedback is invariably very positive.

It also means that we just entered the Unified Communications space - this is not an insignificant point. The UC market is expected to grow to almost $48 billion by 2012. To put that into perspective, the Operating System market is around $21 billion right now. It also means that our roadmap going forwards is going to have a lot of integration between GroupWise and T+C, and between those two products into a UC environment.

Of late we have been talking a lot about Unified Messaging and Unified Communications within Novell and with other partners and where we plan to play in that space. It’s not something that we are ready to talk much more about at this point, but it is safe to say that the SiteScape announcement puts us on a particular track.

Over the last few days we have also been briefing a number of the technology analysts, to a very positive reception. One even confirmed that this announcement makes us a technology leader in the Unified Communications space in relation to teaming applications - much of what our competitors talk about right now is vaporware.

There is going to be a lot more to come on all of this. This acquisition is the result of months of hard work by a large team and I would like to welcome the SiteScape guys (and gals) to the fold. To read more about the acquisition read John Dragoon’s Blog , and the press release.