Tarantella, Inc.
Tarantella, Inc., formerly known as Tarantella and Canaveral iQ, was a US-based software company that developed the software Sun Secure Global Desktop and sold. The headquarters was located in Santa Cruz ( California). Today Tarantella belongs to Sun Microsystems and Secure Global Desktop for Windows Propalms Ltd..
The company was under the name of The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO ) as a developer of the Unix variants Xenix (later SCO UNIX and SCO Open Server ) is known and UnixWare for Intel x86 processors prior to 2001.
History
Overview
In 1979, Doug and Larry Michels founded the company The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO ) as a Unix service provider in Santa Cruz, California. In 1987 she brought the same year Microsoft bought up Unix derivative Xenix version 3.0 for Intel processors on the market. It was the first SCO Unix their own dar. 1989 the port of Xenix to the 386 processor. Once licensed by AT & T was sold from 1989 SCO UNIX, which eventually became the most widely installed Unix system on the x86 architecture. 1993 took the company public ( NASDAQ Stock Exchange: Scox ). Two years later (1995 ) acquired the source code from Novell SCO Unix implementation, called UnixWare, but not the rights to Unix. In the same year was renamed SCO UNIX OpenServer. UnixWare, however, continued to be marketed under the same name.
On 2 August 2001 SCO announced that they wanted to sell their server software department with its Unix derivatives UnixWare and Open Server and the associated service and support department at Caldera. The sale was completed in May 2002, and Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group. Furthermore, now the company was renamed UnixWare OpenUnix. The latest version of Open Server was released in June 2001. The remaining part of SCO, Tarantella department, named in Tarantella, Inc. to, with Alok Mohan as CEO.
The Tarantella project
1993 SCO acquired the company IXI Limited, a software company in Cambridge, UK, which was with his X desktop well known. 1994, followed by vision goods from Leeds (Great Britain), the developers of XVision. Both teams were merged in 1995 to IXI Vision Ware, later Client Integration Department (CID ) of SCO. This client integration department could operate relatively independent from the rest of SCO and specialize on integrating Windows and Unix systems. They were allowed a period of time to maintain their own website and ported their own software on all Unix platforms, including the competition of SCO.
Occasionally there was some friction between CID and SCO: SCO General threw the CID pretend to be arrogant and intentionally inkooperativ, while the CID SCO held for slow and bureaucratic.
Published in 1997 CID the Vision97 product line (later Vision2K ): XVision Eclipse ( a PC X server), VisionFS ( SMB server for Unix), Term Vision ( a terminal emulator for Microsoft Windows), Supervision ( Central Management for Windows users), SQL Retriever ( an ODBC -compliant database connectivity software, set later. ) and Term Lite ( a stripped down version of term vision ). The VisionFS product was developed from scratch by the Cambridge team. The other products have been developed by the Leeds team, so most of the new versions of the Vision Ware products.
Parallel to the Vision97 developments took a separate project development team in 1996 his work on: Codename Tarantella. The goal of this project was: "somewhere is any customer with any application ". The Tarantellaprojekt proposed an offer that hits on back-end servers hosted applications of any kind and type of each client computer permits, the Java-based Web browser.
First steps of the project
The first website of Tarantella presented Christmas 1996 with live demos of simple applications. The first release of Tarantella was 1.0 in November 1997, and thus the codename manifested as a final product name. The later versions of Tarantella 1.x supported more applications (like Microsoft Windows) and clients ( also native clients, the dependence was omitted from the Java support) than the first. Scalability and security features has been added to the product, to support larger enterprise security products and applications over the Internet better. The end of 1999 it was renamed Tarantella Enterprise II. Version 2.x there never was. Then there was also the restricted Tarantella Express product for Linux.
Reorganization
In April 2000, SCO reorganized into three divisions: The server software department, the Professional Services Department and the Tarantella Department. At this time the website of tarantella.sco.com after www.tarantella.com moved to the autonomy and importance of reflecting Tarantella. In November 2000, the Tarantella Enterprise version 3.0 followed with a newly written server code in Java for Linux and Unix. In the following years, further improvements of 3.x were added. Tarantella was now simultaneously compete with software from Citrix.
The descent
2001 now came the above mentioned renamed Tarantella and the sale of the other two departments together with Unix to Caldera. Despite the growth in sales it was not possible across the enterprise to define clear sales goals and successfully complete. One of the reasons was the downward movement of the technology market ( bursting of the dot-com bubble ). Despite the much-publicized main product of Tarantella this company was never profitable enough and had to dismiss the period 2001 to 2003 Employees. The problems were not better than SCO Tarantella supported in litigation against IBM. 2003 Tarantella could no longer fulfill the conditions for remaining in the listing of the NASDAQ SmallCap Market. Consequently, there was a 1 -to-5 stock split. Gratifying was the simultaneous acquisition of New Moon, the developers of Canaveral iQ, a terminal application for Microsoft Windows and a competing product for Citrix.
In July, stated the CEO Doug Michels that isolated economic practices in European sales area would substantially reduce the profits for the previous quarter. Later, more discrepancies were found, which drew a further review of any quarter results by itself. The consequence was followed on the foot: In September 2003, the Supervisory Board chairman Alok Mohan was Chief Financial Officer for Randall Bresee. In the following months Tarantella was removed from the list and Nasdaq began trading " over the counter " (OTC). Also in October, the company received additional private financial support. On 1 December 2003 Doug Michels was replaced by Frank Wilde as CEO. On January 6, 2004 John Greeley Alok Mohan followed by CFO.
Even more changes took place in the organization top of Tarantella in February 2004: Almost all the members of the Executive Team were exchanged. But at the same time, the company received a cash injection of approximately $ 16 million and in March could Tarantella Caststream, Inc, buy, a provider of community software. It is notable that Caststream was already used by management, as it brought Frank Wilde when he was CEO of Tarantella. In April Tarantella was re- listed on the NASDAQ since now the obligatory annual report could be presented again.
On 10 May 2004, the former Tarantella Enterprise 3, and the Canaveral iQ was renamed after Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition or Secure Global Desktop, Terminal Services Edition. Furthermore Tarantella announced a RDP terminal program for Linux.
On 10 May 2005, Sun Microsystems announced plans to take over Tarantella for 25 million dollars. Meanwhile Tarantella is incorporated as a corporate entity and Secure Global Desktop for Windows Terminal Server to Propalms Ltd.. resold.