Attachmate
Encyclopedia
Attachmate Corporation is a software company owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners
, Golden Gate Capital, and Thoma Cressey Bravo
. Attachmate focuses on terminal emulation, legacy modernization, managed file transfer, and enterprise fraud management software. Attachmate Corporation is a principal holding within The Attachmate Group. In addition to Attachmate Corporation, The Attachmate Group's other principal holdings include NetIQ, Novell, and SUSE.
s:
) client and server for Windows and UNIX.
software companies in the world, with offices in more than 50 cities in North America and in 30 countries. The company made several acquisitions, through mergers and purchases, to expand its range of host access hardware and software solutions. Its products and the company itself won numerous awards, including being named one of the “Best Companies to Work For” by Washington CEO magazine.
Attachmate served 80% of Fortune 500
and Global 2000
companies, with over 13 million users worldwide. Attachmate's major development locations included their headquarters in Bellevue
, an office in Bellingham, Washington
, and a facility in Cincinnati, Ohio
. In the early days, Attachmate focused on 3270 emulation
for PCs with some hardware 3270 boards as well. Attachmate invested heavily in its sales and marketing organization worldwide in the early 90s and quickly grew its market share from 3rd in the host-connectivity market to 1st with its EXTRA! Personal Client product. The company continued to grow organically as well as through acquisition of KEA Systems (makers of KEAterm VT340 and VT420
terminal emulator
s, and KEA X x terminal
software), and DCA (makers of IRMA line of emulators
, INFOconnect, Crosstalk communications software, and OpenMind collaborative software
). Later, the company also acquired The Wollongong Group (makers of Pathway TCP and Emissary).
After the acquisition of DCA, the company quickly dominated the 3270, 5250 and VT marketplace, and built its revenues in excess of $400 million in 1995 - as compared to roughly $40M just five years earlier. A Senior Management transition led by incoming CEO Jim Lindner made an attempt to create a unified product strategy and take the company public. The strategy received positive reviews from customers and the press initially but eventually stalled as a clash between Pre and Post DCA-merger management destabilized product development and Frank Pritt took back the helm in July 1996.
Bill Boisvert, formerly of Paccar
, was the next president from January 1998 until his resignation in October 2000 after a year of layoffs and flat revenue growth.
The next stage of its history was marked by tight fiscal management and managing to the bottom line. As revenues were impacted through the bursting tech bubble
after 2001, Attachmate was hit with successive rounds of layoffs. In 2001, the Burnaby
development center was closed; in June 2002 the Cincinnati
development center was closed and the company's VP of Development was fired.
On April 18, 2005, it was announced that three investment companies, Golden Gate Capital, Francisco Partners, and Thoma Cressey Equity Partners, would buy Attachmate. Attachmate would be merged with long-time competitor WRQ, whom the investors had bought previously.
Attachmate no longer sells or supports 3270 IRMA, SDLC, or ISCA SDLC hardware adapters, or provides driver downloads. In February 2007, they sold their remaining hardware inventory to Alpine Computer Systems, a legacy equipment reseller, and refers customers to them for sales and service on hardware adapters and drivers.
for the HP 3000
. Based in Seattle, Washington, WRQ was one of the 20 largest software companies, and consistently ranked in Fortune magazine’s “100 Best companies to Work for in America,” and Washington CEO magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For.”
On December 6, 2004, it was announced that WRQ had been purchased by an investment group.
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. The vacated headquarters of Attachmate in the Factoria neighborhood of Bellevue, Washington
were quickly filled by T-Mobile
, who already occupied part of the building.
The company continued to support both Attachmate and WRQ product sets (which overlap in many cases) until products could be merged or replaced.
and security management
software. It provided businesses worldwide with solutions to monitor, analyze, and optimize the performance, availability, and security of IT
infrastructure. Its flagship products included AppManager and Security Manager. The company headquarters were in San Jose, California
, with about 900 employees worldwide. Their Nasdaq
ticker
symbol was NTIQ.
NetIQ's toolset included systems, security, VoIP and Administration software.
On April 27, 2006, AttachmateWRQ announced an agreement to acquire NetIQ for about 495 million USD, and that the deal would close in 90 days. NetIQ would be merged into AttachmateWRQ, creating a single company with $400 million annual revenue and over 40,000 customers in 60 countries. On June 20, they announced that NetIQ shareholders had approved this purchase, and the acquisition would be complete by the end of that month.
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.
On June 30, 2008, Scalable Software announced in a press release that they had acquired the WinINSTALL business unit (substantially all assets of the former OnDemand) from Attachmate.
that had wandered onto his Colorado
ranch. Hawn pled guilty in November, 2008 to criminal mischief and animal cruelty and was released on $15,000 bail. Hawn and hired hands shot and killed 32 bison—including cows carrying calves—which had wandered onto and near his property from a neighboring ranch in Park County, Colorado
. The arrest warrant said most were left to rot. The Bison had reportedly wandered through broken fences and caused property damages. Under Colorado range laws Bison can only graze on public land not private property.
announced in November 2010 that it had agreed to be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion.
On April 27, 2011, The Attachmate Group announced the completion of the acquisition of Novell, Inc., a leader in intelligent workload management, under the terms of the definitive agreement disclosed on November 22, 2010.
On May 2, 2011, immediately following the sale, Attachmate laid off hundreds of Novell employees.
Novell now operates as two separate business units under the Novell and SUSE
brand names and joins Attachmate and NetIQ as holdings of The Attachmate Group. Certain intellectual property
assets are planned to be sold to a consortium of companies led by Microsoft
.
Francisco Partners
Francisco Partners is a private equity firm focusing on structured investments in the information technology sector.Francisco Partners Management LLC was founded in August 1999 and is headquartered in San Francisco and maintains an additional office in London, United Kingdom...
, Golden Gate Capital, and Thoma Cressey Bravo
Thoma Cressey Bravo
Thoma Cressey Bravo, formerly Thoma Cressey Equity Partners, is a private equity and growth capital firm based in Chicago and San Francisco...
. Attachmate focuses on terminal emulation, legacy modernization, managed file transfer, and enterprise fraud management software. Attachmate Corporation is a principal holding within The Attachmate Group. In addition to Attachmate Corporation, The Attachmate Group's other principal holdings include NetIQ, Novell, and SUSE.
Products
As a result of the mergers and acquisitions detailed below, Attachmate has broadened its solution set to include several brands:Terminal emulation
Attachmate develops a variety of terminal emulatorTerminal emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....
s:
- Reflection (IBM, HP, UNIX, OpenVMS, X)
- EXTRA!(IBM, UNIX, OpenVMS)
- INFOConnect (Unisys)
Managed file transfer
FileXpress managed file transfer solutions help you securely transfer files of any size, across all major platforms, to any location.Secure communications
Reflection for Secure IT, formerly F-Secure SSH, is an SSH (secure shellSecure Shell
Secure Shell is a network protocol for secure data communication, remote shell services or command execution and other secure network services between two networked computers that it connects via a secure channel over an insecure network: a server and a client...
) client and server for Windows and UNIX.
Application integration
- Attachmate Verastream provides application integration tools that quickly and noninvasively service-enable mainframe and enterprise host data and logic.
- Attachmate DATABridge is an extract, transform, loadExtract, transform, loadExtract, transform and load is a process in database usage and especially in data warehousing that involves:* Extracting data from outside sources* Transforming it to fit operational needs...
(ETL) solution for securely integrating Unisys DMSIIUnisys DMSIIThe Unisys Data Management System II is a database system originally created by the Burroughs Corporation in 1972. It was available on the Burroughs Small , Medium and Large System product lines...
and non-DMSII data to a secondary database such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.
PC X server
Reflection X allows Windows users to use graphical and command-line based applications on remote UNIX, Linux, and OpenVMS hosts.Enterprise fraud management
Luminet enterprise fraud management software sees, records, and analyzes user activity across all applications to help monitor, detect, and prevent a range of abuses, including insider fraud and regulatory violations.Attachmate Corporation
Attachmate, founded in 1982 by Frank W. Pritt and Tom Borkowski, focused initially on the IBM terminal emulation market, and became a major technology employer in the Seattle area. Based in Bellevue, Washington, the company became one of the largest PCIBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
software companies in the world, with offices in more than 50 cities in North America and in 30 countries. The company made several acquisitions, through mergers and purchases, to expand its range of host access hardware and software solutions. Its products and the company itself won numerous awards, including being named one of the “Best Companies to Work For” by Washington CEO magazine.
Attachmate served 80% of Fortune 500
Fortune 500
The Fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune magazine that ranks the top 500 U.S. closely held and public corporations as ranked by their gross revenue after adjustments made by Fortune to exclude the impact of excise taxes companies collect. The list includes publicly and...
and Global 2000
Forbes Global 2000
The Forbes Global 2000 is an annual ranking of the top 2000 public companies in the world by Forbes magazine. The ranking is based on a mix of four metrics: sales, profit, assets and market value...
companies, with over 13 million users worldwide. Attachmate's major development locations included their headquarters in Bellevue
Bellevue, Washington
Bellevue is a city in the Eastside region of King County, Washington, United States, across Lake Washington from Seattle. Long known as a suburb or satellite city of Seattle, it is now categorized as an edge city or a boomburb. The population was 122,363 at the 2010 census.Downtown Bellevue is...
, an office in Bellingham, Washington
Bellingham, Washington
Bellingham is the largest city in, and the county seat of, Whatcom County in the U.S. state of Washington. It is the twelfth-largest city in the state. Situated on Bellingham Bay, Bellingham is protected by Lummi Island, Portage Island, and the Lummi Peninsula, and opens onto the Strait of Georgia...
, and a facility in Cincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio. Cincinnati is the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located to north of the Ohio River at the Ohio-Kentucky border, near Indiana. The population within city limits is 296,943 according to the 2010 census, making it Ohio's...
. In the early days, Attachmate focused on 3270 emulation
3270 emulator
A 3270 Emulator is a computer program that duplicates the functions of an IBM 3270 mainframe computer terminal on a PC or similar microcomputer....
for PCs with some hardware 3270 boards as well. Attachmate invested heavily in its sales and marketing organization worldwide in the early 90s and quickly grew its market share from 3rd in the host-connectivity market to 1st with its EXTRA! Personal Client product. The company continued to grow organically as well as through acquisition of KEA Systems (makers of KEAterm VT340 and VT420
VT420
The VT420 was a computer terminal designed by Digital Equipment Corporation . Introduced in 1990, it fit up to 50 lines on the screen and supported two sessions, either one through each communication port, or by multiplexing two sessions on one line with a suitable terminal server...
terminal emulator
Terminal emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....
s, and KEA X x terminal
X terminal
In computing, an X terminal is a display/input terminal for X Window System client applications. X terminals enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1990s when they offered a lower total cost of ownership alternative to a full Unix workstation....
software), and DCA (makers of IRMA line of emulators
Terminal emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....
, INFOconnect, Crosstalk communications software, and OpenMind collaborative software
Collaborative software
Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...
). Later, the company also acquired The Wollongong Group (makers of Pathway TCP and Emissary).
After the acquisition of DCA, the company quickly dominated the 3270, 5250 and VT marketplace, and built its revenues in excess of $400 million in 1995 - as compared to roughly $40M just five years earlier. A Senior Management transition led by incoming CEO Jim Lindner made an attempt to create a unified product strategy and take the company public. The strategy received positive reviews from customers and the press initially but eventually stalled as a clash between Pre and Post DCA-merger management destabilized product development and Frank Pritt took back the helm in July 1996.
Bill Boisvert, formerly of Paccar
PACCAR
PACCAR Inc is the third largest manufacturer of heavy-duty trucks in the world , and has substantial manufacture in light and medium vehicles through its various subsidiaries.-History:...
, was the next president from January 1998 until his resignation in October 2000 after a year of layoffs and flat revenue growth.
The next stage of its history was marked by tight fiscal management and managing to the bottom line. As revenues were impacted through the bursting tech bubble
Dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
after 2001, Attachmate was hit with successive rounds of layoffs. In 2001, the Burnaby
Burnaby, British Columbia
Burnaby is a city in British Columbia, Canada, located immediately to the east of Vancouver. It is the third-largest city in British Columbia by population, surpassed only by nearby Surrey and Vancouver....
development center was closed; in June 2002 the Cincinnati
Cincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio. Cincinnati is the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located to north of the Ohio River at the Ohio-Kentucky border, near Indiana. The population within city limits is 296,943 according to the 2010 census, making it Ohio's...
development center was closed and the company's VP of Development was fired.
On April 18, 2005, it was announced that three investment companies, Golden Gate Capital, Francisco Partners, and Thoma Cressey Equity Partners, would buy Attachmate. Attachmate would be merged with long-time competitor WRQ, whom the investors had bought previously.
Attachmate no longer sells or supports 3270 IRMA, SDLC, or ISCA SDLC hardware adapters, or provides driver downloads. In February 2007, they sold their remaining hardware inventory to Alpine Computer Systems, a legacy equipment reseller, and refers customers to them for sales and service on hardware adapters and drivers.
WRQ, Inc.
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 emulatorTerminal emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....
for the HP 3000
HP 3000
The HP 3000 series is a family of minicomputers released by Hewlett-Packard in 1973. It was designed to be the first minicomputer delivered with a full featured operating system with time-sharing. The first models were withdrawn from the market until speed improvements could be made. It ultimately...
. Based in Seattle, Washington, WRQ was one of the 20 largest software companies, and consistently ranked in Fortune magazine’s “100 Best companies to Work for in America,” and Washington CEO magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For.”
On December 6, 2004, it was announced that WRQ had been purchased by an investment group.
Attachmate and WRQ merger
After buying both WRQ, Inc. and Attachmate Corporation, who had been long-time competitors in the host emulation business, it was announced that the companies would be merged. On June 1, 2005, the deal closed, and the new company was 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. The vacated headquarters of Attachmate in the Factoria neighborhood of Bellevue, Washington
Bellevue, Washington
Bellevue is a city in the Eastside region of King County, Washington, United States, across Lake Washington from Seattle. Long known as a suburb or satellite city of Seattle, it is now categorized as an edge city or a boomburb. The population was 122,363 at the 2010 census.Downtown Bellevue is...
were quickly filled by T-Mobile
T-Mobile
T-Mobile International AG is a German-based holding company for Deutsche Telekom AG's various mobile communications subsidiaries outside Germany. Based in Bonn, Germany, its subsidiaries operate GSM and UMTS-based cellular networks in Europe, the United States, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands...
, who already occupied part of the building.
The company continued to support both Attachmate and WRQ product sets (which overlap in many cases) until products could be merged or replaced.
NetIQ acquisition
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 managementSystems management
Systems management refers to enterprise-wide administration of distributed systems including computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications....
and security management
Security management
Security Management is a broad field of management related to asset management, physical security and human resource safety functions. It entails the identification of an organization's information assets and the development, documentation and implementation of policies, standards, procedures and...
software. It provided businesses worldwide with solutions to monitor, analyze, and optimize the performance, availability, and security of IT
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
infrastructure. Its flagship products included AppManager and Security Manager. The company headquarters were in San Jose, California
San Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
, with about 900 employees worldwide. Their Nasdaq
NASDAQ
The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...
ticker
Ticker tape
Ticker tape was the earliest digital electronic communications medium, transmitting stock price information over telegraph lines, in use between around 1870 through 1970...
symbol was NTIQ.
NetIQ's toolset included systems, security, VoIP and Administration software.
On April 27, 2006, AttachmateWRQ announced an agreement to acquire NetIQ for about 495 million USD, and that the deal would close in 90 days. NetIQ would be merged into AttachmateWRQ, creating a single company with $400 million annual revenue and over 40,000 customers in 60 countries. On June 20, they announced that NetIQ shareholders had approved this purchase, and the acquisition would be complete by the end of that month.
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 acquisition and sale
On March 7, 2006, AttachmateWRQ announced that they had acquired OnDemand Software. OnDemand Software develops an award-winning product called WinINSTALL, which is for desktop management in IT environments. This product is similar to AttachmateWRQ's existing NetWizard product.On June 30, 2008, Scalable Software announced in a press release that they had acquired the WinINSTALL business unit (substantially all assets of the former OnDemand) from Attachmate.
CEO animal cruelty case
In January, 2009, Jeff Hawn, the president and CEO of Attachmate, was sentenced to 10 days in jail for authorizing the 2008 slaughter of 32 of his neighbor's bisonBison
Members of the genus Bison are large, even-toed ungulates within the subfamily Bovinae. Two extant and four extinct species are recognized...
that had wandered onto his Colorado
Colorado
Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...
ranch. Hawn pled guilty in November, 2008 to criminal mischief and animal cruelty and was released on $15,000 bail. Hawn and hired hands shot and killed 32 bison—including cows carrying calves—which had wandered onto and near his property from a neighboring ranch in Park County, Colorado
Park County, Colorado
Park County is the 17th most extensive of the 64 counties of the State of Colorado of the United States. The county was named after the large geographic region known as South Park, which was named by early fur traders and trappers in the area. The geographic center of the State of Colorado is...
. The arrest warrant said most were left to rot. The Bison had reportedly wandered through broken fences and caused property damages. Under Colorado range laws Bison can only graze on public land not private property.
Novell acquisition
NovellNovell
Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...
announced in November 2010 that it had agreed to be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion.
On April 27, 2011, The Attachmate Group announced the completion of the acquisition of Novell, Inc., a leader in intelligent workload management, under the terms of the definitive agreement disclosed on November 22, 2010.
On May 2, 2011, immediately following the sale, Attachmate laid off hundreds of Novell employees.
Novell now operates as two separate business units under the Novell and SUSE
SUSE Linux distributions
SUSE Linux is a computer operating system. It is built on top of the open source Linux kernel and is distributed with system and application software from other open source projects. SUSE Linux is of German origin and mainly developed in Europe. The first version appeared in early 1994, making...
brand names and joins Attachmate and NetIQ as holdings of The Attachmate Group. Certain intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
assets are planned to be sold to a consortium of companies led by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
.
External links
- Attachmate File Library, Archive.org
- NetiQ Website