WRQ name brand disappears into Attachmate
July 17, 2006
One year after the merger between connectivity rivals Attachmate and WRQ was completed, the companies have decided this month to do business from here on strictly as Attachmate. Earlier this year the corporation which was once WRQ — and an HP 3000 supplier called Walker, Richer & Quinn starting in 1981 — purchased NetIQ for nearly half a billion dollars.
Now that the NetIQ purchase has cleared its hurdles, the company has dropped the WRQ portion of the AttachmateWRQ name. (NetIQ never got a chance to be tacked onto the company name.) The three companies now boast a $400 million yearly run rate and serve more than 40,000 customers. AttachmateWRQ took NetIQ private, buying up its shares off the Nasdaq exchange.
Aside from the name change — and the addition of NetIQ's products and revenue to this conglomerate owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Cressey Equity Partners — the company assures its WRQ customers nothing else has changed. Support numbers and contact information remains the same. Attachmate operates out of the former WRQ HQ on Dexter Avenue in Seattle, although NetIQ does its business out of Houston.
Long, long ago in the 3000 community's timeline, WRQ noted that its prowess in the 3000 connectivity market was unmatched. In one of the first Q&A interviews we ever posted on The 3000 NewsWire Web site, then-VP of sales and marketing Kevin Klustner answered these questions;
HP 3000 terminal emulation is no simple matter, but it continues to draw new entrants on a regular basis. What's WRQ's advantage to sites who might be considering one of these newcomers because they know them from another market?
That's exactly why Attachmate and White Pine are doing the HP stuff. Attachmate is responding to a lot of their IBM-oriented customers that have HP 3000s, and those customers want to buy connectivity from a single vendor. The difference for us is that we were born and grew up in the HP 3000 world, and we know HP terminals and the HP 3000 better than anybody else outside of HP itself.
But is there really a big difference for most customers in how much you know about 3000 emulation?They don't care about terminal emulation so long as it works for them. As soon as some quirky escape sequence comes down, well... More importantly, connecting via network to an HP 3000 is no simple trick.
Three years later in 1999 WRQ denied a rumor it was merging with Attachmate. But the sale of the company to the investor group in late 2004, after WRQ had its best year in the company's history, changed all that. The series of mergers over the past 18 months has put many engineers and managers under one shield, one that Attachmate assures customers has "near complete penetration of the Global 10,000. As a combined organization, Attachmate is uniquely positioned to provide enterprise software that allows customers to extend mission-critical services and assure that they are managed, secure and compliant."