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May 14, 2010

Mandriva S.A., European makers of the Mandriva Linux distribution, is apparently up for sale. Reports from the Linux community site Mandriva Linux Online indicates that Mandriva is in the process of being sold.

U.K.-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) provider LightApp and the French open source software firm Linagora have both manifested a strong interest in the group.

"Linagora is a player in the innovation of Open Source software and is thus searching for opportunities to develop and enhance its Linux leadership position in France and in the world. For this reason, discussions are currently in progress with Mandriva to acquire the outstanding stock of the company," a Linagora spokesperson said yesterday.

Mandriva is a publicly traded company listed on the Paris Stock Exchange. An acquisition from either company might be the ultimate move for the company, once known as Mandrake Linux. Despite it's continued popularity in the Linux community in Europe, Mandriva was unfortunately not able to capture much market share in the enterprise arena, even after Mandrake Linux acquired South American Linux vendor Conectiva to become Mandriva.

In 1993, the company made repeated efforts to enter the U.S. market, but was unable to achieve any success against giant Red Hat and its strong European rival S.U.S.E., which did make a successful Atlantic crossing by virtue of its acquisition by Novell in November 2003.

Of course, it remains to be seen what will happen to Mandriva if and when the acquisition takes place. Since both LightApp and Linagora seem to run in the same SaaS segment, some observers in the Linux community now think that Mandriva technology will be integrated into those plans.

What isn't clear is whether Mandriva would remain a separate business entity. Mandriva is being vague however, acting the role of potential acquisition target very well. When asked to comment, a spokesperson for Mandriva replied with this boilerplate answer:

"Mandriva, from its very beginning, has been involved in takeover talks. Mandriva bought Edge-IT, Conectiva and Linbox Fas and has been attracted by other possible ventures. Mandriva has also been in talks over merger possibilities or an eventual buy-out by investors. These negotiations have been pursued throughout the life of the company and continue to be. Mandriva has been affected by the economic slow-down and we took advantage of this period to develop and improve our products: an operating system dedicated to a uniquely ergonomic server, the most reliable free machine-management software on the market, Mandriva Smart Desktop to simplify the use of office desktops, education-dedicated distribution, all embrace the Mandriva philosophy of alternative options."

It's a very well known fact that Mandriva suffered some major financial difficulties, especially after the company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. in March 2004. The next year, Mandriva successfully exited the bankruptcy phase of its existence and then-CEO François Bancilhon was prepared to take Mandriva's product line straight to Red Hat and Novell, in whatever market the U.S. companies cared to compete.

But this may not have happened according to plan, however. In January 2007, two major French enterprise deployments were announced. The next month, French automaker Peugeot-Citroen revealed it would be migrating 20,000 Windows desktops to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

After that, the French Parliament, which had already decided to shift its administrative systems to Linux, announced the finalization of its plans to migrate to Ubuntu. Notably, Mandriva wasn't part of either of these migration announcements, much to the chagrin of Mandriva shareholders and its top executives.

"Overall, we are just beginning to harvest the results of this development work with hundreds of thousands of computers and servers (really?) using the Mandriva operating system sold in South America and sales of Pulse2 and MES-5 in Europe. It comes as no surprise that Mandriva has once again attracted the interest of industry decision-makers," a company statement concluded.

It will be interesting to see if Mandriva gets acquired at all and by whom.

Some observers in the Linux community think that it may never happen, given the major struggles Mandriva has had over the past 17 years.

As always, we will keep you posted.

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Source: ELN.

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