Micro Focus to buy dev-ops shop Serena in $540M deal

The companies are waiting for approval for the US$540 million deal from competition authorities in the U.S. and Germany, and hope to complete it in May.

U.K.-based Micro Focus, long a specialist in enterprise application modernization, has a broader portfolio following its 2009 purchase of another application lifecycle management vendor, Borland, and its $1.2 billion acquisition of Attachmate in 2014. That company had itself added to a range of terminal emulation, legacy modernization and managed file transfer software through a series of acquisitions including Novell, SUSE and NetIQ.

Micro Focus chose to integrate under its own brand the Attachmate, Novell, Borland and NetIQ product lines, maintaining Attachmate's SUSE Linux portfolio as a separate brand.

Acquiring Serena will allow Micro Focus to deploy existing core business applications on a wider variety of platforms, the company said.

It will also gain access to Serena's automated release and deployment tools. Serena is also, according to Micro Focus, a pioneer in "true DevOps," with processes and solutions bridging application development and operations.