The deal to acquire SiteScape came about 18 months ago when the two companies entered into an OEM partnership in order to release Novell Teaming + Conferencing, a workspace and real-time conferencing solution that is centered on the ICEcore open source technology.

"The next logical step was to bring the two companies together to take advantage of the synergies," said Gregory Webb, collaboration product marketing manager with Novell.

The acquisition would also see Novell completely owning SiteScape's product road map, development plans and their engineers.

He added that it was essential for Novell to add open source team collaboration technology to their line card because of the company's focus and interest in open source standards and openness in terms of interoperability.

"One of the things customers were telling us over and over was no one works in a wholly homogenous environment," said Webb.

Novell Teaming + Conferencing runs on both Linux and Windows and works with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, in addition to GroupWise. These team workspaces, accessible securely by team members both inside and outside the company, incorporate multiple integrated collaboration tools, including blogs, wikis, instant message, chat, voice over IP and Web conferencing.

By acquiring SiteScape, Webb added that Novell strengthens its commitment to the technology, gains the flexibility to create the solutions customers and partners need and increases its capacity to deliver more interoperability around open collaboration.

What SiteScape brings to Novell is 10 years of leadership in the collaboration space. What Novell brings to SiteScape is better market penetration because the company only had a small direct sales force and its channel presence was limited.

"They had little penetration in the market, which frustrated SiteScape," noted Webb. "What Novell brings to the acquisition is an extensive worldwide partner ecosystem that can [reach] that market better because we have a much larger channel base as well as a very large customer base that SiteScape partners can begin to sell into."

Even though the SiteScape name would be discontinued, Webb said that Novell would still provide support for existing SiteScape customers for the company's products like Forum ST and Zon over the next several years until they transition over to Novell technology.

Mark Levitt, program vice-president for collaborative computing and the enterprise workplace with IDC Corp., said combined Novell-SiteScape offerings represent the next major step forward for business collaboration.

"Enterprise and SMB customers are looking for solutions that combine real-time messaging, conferencing and IP voice calling along with online workspaces, social networking, blogs, and wikis to improve team and enterprise productivity and innovation," he added.