Novell's Final Earnings Report?

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In what may turn out to be Novell’s final earnings report as a public company, revenues continued to fall as the company is set to be acquired.

Enterprise software vendor Novell (NASDAQ:NOVL) is on the verge of being acquired for $2.2 billion by Attachmate. For its fourth quarter fiscal 2010, Novell reported net revenue of $207 million which is a decline from the $216 million in net revenue reported for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2009. Analysts polled by Thompson Reuters had expected revenue of $204.1 million. Novell declined to provide its own guidance at the end of the third quarter for the fourth quarter outlook.

On the net income side of the books, Novell reported fourth quarter income of $322 million or $0.91 per share which improves on the $256 million net loss that Novell reported for the fourth quarter of 2009. The bulk of Novell’s net income gains in the fourth quarter of 2001 came by way of $308 million in non-cash tax provision benefits.

Novell cancelled its scheduled analyst call to discuss the results and declined to comment to InternetNews.com.

In a press release statement, Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell said that he was pleased with his company’s fourth quarter performance.

“We continue to see strong performance from our Linux business with invoicing for Linux, excluding Microsoft certificates, up over 40 percent from the year ago period and the prior fiscal year,” Hovsepian stated.

Novell has a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to resell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) support subscriptions. On an overall earnings basis, Novell’s Linux business actually declined during the fourth quarter of 2010. Novell reported earnings from its Linux platforms products business at $36 million which is a decline from the $39 million Novell reported for the fourth quarter of 2009. Taking a broader look, Novell’s Linux platform revenues for all of 2010 totaled $153 million, a decline from the $157 million reported for 2009.

On the positive side, Novell’s identity and security management business grew in 2010. Novell reported total identity and security management revenues of $129 million for 2010 up from $121 million in 2009. Novell’s identity and security management offerings include a new cloud-focused Identity Manger 4.0 release and the recently launched Cloud Security Service.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.