The Attachmate Group finalized its $2.2 billion buyout of network industry pioneer Novell a few days ago. The latter will be separated into two separate business units, one focused on the Novell brand and the other on the SUSE Linux brand.

Now, we’ve learned of the latest Novell move by the Attachmate Group – it has laid off hundreds of employees from its Provo, Utah campus. Some reports estimate about 700-800 employees have been laid off, while one source says that these layoffs mainly affected human resources, finance, accounting and legal departments as well under-performing ones.

Wikibon analyst Dave Vallente had seen it coming:

“Novell had a near monopoly in PC networking. It was a player as well-positioned as Microsoft and Intel in PC markets and could have been a software version of cisco in theory. Its only competition was a ridiculously complex IBM and Digital and a teeny tiny bit of microsoft and a bunch of no name startups.

Ray Noorda ruined Novell by incorrectly thinking he could hurt Microsoft by acquiring wordperfect. Craig is spot on — it took Novell’s focus off of it’s core strength and allowed Microsoft to bundle networking into the OS sealing Novell’s demise.”

Other companies have already posted openings, but some of the Novell jobs, and even additional positions, may return to Provo.  This is based on a fresh statement sent out by Jeff Hawn, chairman and CEO of Attachmate:

“We’re very excited to be bringing Novell back to its roots and moving the headquarters back to Provo and back to Utah. This will become the center for the Novell business going forward.”

Sadly, layoffs are a harsh byproduct of an active M&A market, with the cloud industry seeing a number of recent deals. Among them is VMware’s acquisition of Sliderocket, a cloud-based online presentation app. The company’s technology will power a VMware presentation-as-a-service offering.

Another cloud acquisition is Apple’s purchase of the domain name iCloud.com. The deal involved $4.5 million paid to Swedish cloud services provider Xcverion, and the domain is expected by some to be used for either iTunes storage and streaming, or even the rebranding of Apple’s MobileMe personal cloud management product.

As far as layoffs go, Novell’s not the only company facing cut backs.  While some of Novell’s employees may be able to reestablish themselves for the company, but that may not be the case for some Cisco employees. The company recently pulled the plug on its Flip business, and laid off 550 employees.