WhereIsAtlas · Novell
What Happened to Novell?
The networking software giant behind NetWare — now just a name inside larger companies.
Novell was the dominant force in corporate networking in the 1980s and 1990s, built on its NetWare software. It was acquired by Attachmate in 2011, then by Micro Focus in 2014, and its assets eventually became part of OpenText.
The king of corporate networking
Novell, founded in Provo, Utah, in 1983, built NetWare — the network operating system that became the backbone of business computing. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, if a company networked its PCs, it almost certainly ran Novell software.
A changing market
Novell's fortunes turned as Microsoft pushed deeper into networking and the internet shifted how businesses worked. A string of acquisitions, including the purchase of SUSE Linux, couldn't stop the slide, and Novell became a shadow of the company that had once shaped an industry.
Absorbed by bigger companies
In 2011 Novell was acquired by The Attachmate Group. Three years later, in 2014, Attachmate merged with Micro Focus. Novell's software and brand were folded into that company, and when OpenText bought Micro Focus in 2022, anything left of Novell passed to it as well.
Where Novell is now
The Novell name and its products no longer exist as an independent company, surviving only as parts of OpenText. But its role in inventing modern PC networking remains clear — a pioneer that built the networked office long before the internet made it universal.
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Sources
- Novell - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-05)
- Micro Focus buying Novell, Suse Linux owner for $1.2 billion — InfoWorld (2026-09-05)