While Dan Dorfman of CNBC, the cable television arm of General Electric Co Inc’s National Broadcasting Corp, was saying that the list of putative suitors for Borland International Inc is growing, and naming IBM Corp, Oracle Corp, Informix Corp and Computer Associates International Inc among potential buyers, adding that IBM looked at buying Borland about a year ago, PC Week was going with a rather firmer story, saying that the buyer would likely be Novell Inc. Novell’s board gave chairman Robert Frankenberg permission to buy Borland nearly five months ago, according to sources familiar with the deliberations, the trade weekly said. It cites the sources saying Novell’s board gave a green light after Frankenberg approached it with a hypothetical buyout bid for Borland, and suggests that the delay is because Frankenberg is being especially deliberate in order to avoid the kind of criticism faced by his predecessor, Ray Noorda, who was chided by investors for bulldozing the board into approving the acquisitions of Unix System Laboratories Inc and WordPerfect Corp. Novell wants Borland’s Paradox and Interbase database technology, and its tools and languages to enhance substantially the applications development environment for NetWare by standardising on Delphi. It already has rights to include Paradox in its applications suite, reportedly for three years, but the suite is going sufficiently well that outright ownership would be attractive. PC Week reckons that Computer Associates, Lotus Development Corp and Fujitsu Ltd have all looked at Borland and walked away. Dorfman reckons that Borland would go for $18 to $20 a share, about $500m all told, against a current $11.875. Novell wouldn’t deny the speculation but declined to comment.
