Attachmate Completes NetIQ Acquisition, Previews Vista Support

Attachmate, formerly known as AttachmateWRQ after these two companies were acquired by venture capitalists and merged last year, has completed its $495 million acquisition of systems management and security software vendor NetIQ. In the wake of the acquisition, the company simplified its name back to Attachmate.

Attachmate is headquartered in Seattle, and the NetIQ operations remain located in Houston. Logan Wray, senior vice president of acquisitions for the company, has been named general manager of the NetIQ unit, while Marc Andrews, a senior vice president at Attachmate, has been named chief operating officer of NetIQ. With the combination of the three companies, Attachmate now has about $400 million in annual sales and 40,000 customers.

Attachmate also announced last week at Microsoft‘s Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston that it would be the first host access software company to support the forthcoming Vista release of the Windows PC operating system, which is supposed to start rolling out to partners in November of this year and be available to consumers in January 2007. (Of course, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, said last week that there was an 80 percent chance that Vista would ship on time, which is just a nice way of saying that there is a 20 percent chance that it will slip again. Vista, which used to be known under the code-name “Longhorn,” was supposed to ship in 2005.) Attachmate will support Vista with its Reflection line of host access products, as well as launching EXTRA! X-treme v9 (which is surely an eye sore of a product name, if there ever was one) terminal emulation product, which hooks into Microsoft’s Office desktop applications. EXTRA! X-treme v9 was on display at the Microsoft event and will launch in November. We’ll see if Vista does.