There were concerns about the future of SUSE Linux products after Novell’s acquisition by Attachmate because earlier this month the new owner had reduced the American staff of what has become one of its business units. It seems that the laid off workers are between 700 and 800.

Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn stated that the SUSE headquarters has returned to Nuremberg, where it was years ago when it was an independent company before it was acquired by Novell. In essence what has been bad news for Americans should be good news for Germans, who see the main SUSE Linux development center back in their country.

However Jeff Hawn has also hinted at the Mono project giving the impression that it wasn’t exactly a priority for Attachamete and it seems that Mono developers are among those laid off. Maybe it’s accidental but at the beginning of the week Miguel de Icaza, Mono project leader, announced the launch of a new company called Xamarin with the main purpose of continuing the development of this open source .NET clone and of Moonlight, the Silverlight technology port to Linux.

Attachmate has now formalized the appointment of Nils Brauckmann as president of the new SUSE business unit. The company also affirmed its commitment to SUSE products: the Enterprise packages, the openSUSE project, SUSE Studio and SUSE manager.

Attachmate has also purchased other products from Novell such as Open Enterprise Server, a set of NetWare services running on the SUSE Linux kernel, NetWare, GroupWise and some others. Those products should be developed separately.

According to the new president of this unit business the new SUSE status will allow focusing the developers energies on the Linux market. This should lead to an improvement in product development to offer high-value solutions across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Changes in the availability and prices of the products they offer aren’t expected.

Nils Brauckmann is a manager who has worked in sales and marketing originally for WRQ and then for Attchmate when the two companies merged in 2005. Though in various business divisions he has worked in the software field, now we have to see how he’s going to handle non-proprietary products such as those related to SUSE Linux.

Of course Brauckmann’s statements about Linux are very positive and optimistic, as his role requires. From the users perspective right now it’s possible to express a cautious optimism for a successful continuation of SUSE’s glorious brand.