The new chief executive of Novell is likely to invest some of the company’s resources in a purchase or purchases to strengthen the firm’s management tools.

Ron Hovsepian, confirmed as the replacement for Jack Messman in an announcement last week, said “management services” software would be a possible area for acquisitions.

In an interview with IT Week today (26 June), Hovsepian, who spent 17 years at IBM before joining Novell three years ago, noted identity management, systems management, resource management and virtualisation management programs as areas of interest.

Although the company has struggled for share value growth in recent years, it still sits on a large cash pile, leading many watchers to call for more merger and acquisition activity.

Conversely, there has recently been speculation that Novell itself may be acquired after Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said he had considered a move to take the database software giant into operating systems. Novell bought Suse, one of the strongest Linux distribution firms, in 2003.

Hovsepian declined to comment on the prospects of Novell being taken over or on possible staff cuts. He also said that it would be September or later before he spelled out plans to bring more “clarity” of focus to the company, in terms of product line-up and pricing.

Some critics have argued that Novell is currently too broad with, for example, competing interests in groupware. Hovsepian himself noted pricing complexity as an issue in a conference call to mark his appointment.

“I think there are lots of things to do to simplify the company,” said Hovsepian. “You have to have customer segments you focus in on and we’ll be really clear where we focus.”

Despite his years at IBM, Hovsepian said that Novell would not follow that firm’s path to growth through services. Instead, Novell will be “trending more towards software”, he said.

Hovsepian was bullish on the prospects for the next release of the Suse desktop Linux package, due in July. “The open-source community has allowed us to develop innovation on the desktop at a tenth of the cost of Microsoft,” he said.