Attachmate bought NetIQ on April 27 for $495m, saying it would combine Attachmate’s legacy host integration and modernization software with NetIQ’s systems and security management portfolio and call the company Attachmate-NetIQ.

But when the acquisition was completed on July 5, following NetIQ board and shareholder approval, Attachmate announced that the company would instead simply be called Attachmate Corp.

Explaining the change of heart, Attachmate UK managing director Ian McKay told us: It’s all about simplicity. He noted that the company is still using the NetIQ brand to market the former NetIQ products, and said that NetIQ is run as a separate business unit.

McKay said he could not comment on whether the NetIQ and Attachmate sales forces will be combined, but did say that one of the obvious reasons for the acquisition was to try and cross-sell NetIQ products to the Attachmate installed base and vice versa.

After the acquisition of NetIQ, and the earlier acquisition of WRQ, Attachmate now claims to have combined revenue of over $400m and to have 40,000 customers, with its software on 16 million desktops worldwide.

Attachmate was itself the result of the merging of Attachmate and WRQ last year, both acquired by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Cressey Equity Partners.

While Attachmate has kept the NetIQ brand alive so far it is likely that it will fall by the wayside eventually, just as the acquired WRQ brand did a year after its acquisition. Ironically a holding page at www.wrq.com still says that WRQ is now doing business as AttachmateWRQ, despite the fact that it has gone from Attachmate-NetIQ back to plain old Attachmate since then.

Attachmate has historically competed in the host connectivity market with the likes of IBM, NetManage, Hummingbird, Facet Corp, and Segull. All were chasing a relatively mature market and competition caused a wave of consolidation. Host connectivity company Pericom Holdings was bought by Neoware Systems, and fellow host connectivity player NetManage has made a series of purchases of its own including Wall Data, Simware, Librados, and FTP Software.

Through the acquisitions of OnDemand software for software distribution management and NetIQ for systems and security management, Attachmate has sought to diversify its portfolio though it still makes most of its revenue from the host access and modernization space.