Tarantella (company)
Tarantella, Inc. , formerly known as Tarantella and Canaveral iQ , was a US software company that developed and sold software of the same name (later renamed Secure Global Desktop ). The headquarters were in Santa Cruz (California) . Tarantella was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2005 .
Before 2001, the company was known as The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) as the developer of the Unix variants SCO Xenix , SCO UNIX (later renamed SCO OpenServer ) and UnixWare for Intel x86 processors.
Company history
overview
In 1979, Doug and Larry Michels founded The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) as a Unix service provider in Santa Cruz, California. In 1983 she brought the same year by Microsoft licensed Unix derivative Xenix for Intel - processors on the market. In 1985 Xenix was ported to the 80286 , and in 1987 to the 80386 . Since Microsoft had lost interest in Xenix in the meantime, SCO got all rights to Xenix overwritten in 1987, in return Microsoft got 25% of the company shares from SCO. After the licensing of System V Release 3.2 from AT&T and the porting to the 80836, SCO UNIX was sold from 1989 , which eventually became the most frequently installed Unix system on the x86 architecture . In 1993 the company went public ( NASDAQ Stock Exchange: SCOX). Two years later (1995) SCO acquired the source code of Novell's Unix implementation called UnixWare , but not the rights to Unix. In the same year SCO UNIX was renamed OpenServer. UnixWare, however, continued to be marketed under the same name.
On August 2, 2001, SCO announced that they wanted to sell their server software department with its Unix derivatives UnixWare and OpenServer as well as the associated service and support department to Caldera . The sale was completed in May 2002 and Caldera was renamed Caldera International and later SCO Group . Furthermore, the renaming from UnixWare to OpenUnix took place. The last version of OpenServer was released in June 2001. The remainder of SCO, the Tarantella division, was renamed Tarantella , Inc., with Alok Mohan as CEO .
The Tarantella Project
In 1993 SCO acquired IXI Limited, a software company in Cambridge , Great Britain that was well known for its X Desktop . In 1994 the developers of XVision followed with Visionware from Leeds (Great Britain). Both teams were merged in 1995 to form IXI Visionware, the later Client Integration Department (CID) of SCO. This client integration department was able to operate relatively independently from the rest of SCO and specialize in integrating Windows and Unix systems. They were allowed to keep their own website for a while and ported their own software to all Unix platforms, also to the competition from SCO.
Occasionally there was some friction between the CID and SCO: in general, SCO accused the CID of being arrogant and deliberately uncooperative, while the CID considered SCO to be slow and bureaucratic.
In 1997, CID published the Vision97 product range (later Vision2K): XVision Eclipse (a PC-X server), VisionFS (SMB server for Unix), TermVision (a terminal emulator for Microsoft Windows), SuperVision (central management for Windows users), SQL Retriever (an ODBC-compliant database connection software , discontinued later.) And TermLite (a slimmed-down version of TermVision). The VisionFS product was developed from the ground up by the Cambridge team. However, the other products were developed by the Leeds team, so most of the new versions of the Visionware products.
Parallel to the Vision97 developments, a separate project development team started work in 1996: code name Tarantella. The goal of this project was: “somewhere is some customer with some application”. The Tarantella Project intended an offer that would allow access to any type or type of backend server hosted applications from any client computer that supported Java-based web browsers.
First steps in the project
Tarantella's first website was presented at Christmas 1996 with live demonstrations of simple applications. The first release of Tarantella 1.0 was in November 1997 and with that the code name manifested itself as the final product name. The later versions of Tarantella 1.x supported more applications (like Microsoft Windows) and clients (also native clients, so that the dependency on Java support was eliminated) than the first. Scalability and security features were added to the product to better support larger enterprise products and security applications over the Internet. In late 1999, it was renamed Tarantella Enterprise II. Version 2.x never existed. Then there was also the limited Tarantella Express product for Linux .
reorganization
In April 2000, SCO reorganized into three departments: the server software department, the professional services department and the tarantella department. At this time the website moved from tarantella.sco.com to www.tarantella.com, reflecting the independence and importance of 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 also in competition with the software from Citrix .
The descent
2001 came the renaming in Tarantella mentioned above and the sale of the other two departments together with Unix to Caldera. Despite the growth in sales, the entire company failed to define clear sales goals and successfully complete them. One of the reasons was the downward movement of the technology market (bursting of the dotcom bubble ). Despite the widely acclaimed main product of Tarantella, this company was never profitable enough and therefore had to lay off employees in the period 2001 to 2003. The problems didn't get any better when Tarantella supported the Caldera, which has since been renamed the SCO Group, in the lawsuit against IBM . In 2003, Tarantella was no longer able to meet the conditions for being listed on the NASDAQ SmallCap market. As a consequence, there was a 1-to-5 share split. The simultaneous takeover of New Moon, the developers of Canaveral iQ, a terminal server application for Microsoft Windows and a competing product for Citrix was gratifying.
In July, CEO Doug Michels stated that isolated economic practices in the European retail space would significantly dampen earnings for the previous quarter. More inconsistencies were found later, which resulted in a further review of all quarterly results. The consequence was immediate: In September 2003, Alok Mohan, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, became Chief Financial Officer for Randall Bresee. In the following months, Tarantella was removed from the Nasdaq list and began trading "over the counter" ( OTC ). The company also received additional private financial support in October. On December 1, 2003, Doug Michels was replaced by Frank Wilde as CEO. On January 6, 2004, John Greeley succeeded Alok Mohan as CFO.
Even more changes took place at the top of the Tarantella organization in February 2004: Almost all members of the executive team were replaced. But at the same time, the company received a cash injection of approximately $ 16 million, and in March Tarantella was able to buy Caststream, Inc, a community software provider. What is remarkable is that Caststream was already used by management, as Frank Wilde brought it with him when he became CEO of Tarantella. In April, Tarantella was listed again in the NASDAQ, as the mandatory annual report could now be presented again.
On May 10, 2004, Tarantella Enterprise 3 was renamed to Secure Global Desktop and Canaveral iQ was renamed to Secure Global Desktop, Terminal Services Edition (SGD-TSE). Tarantella also announced an RDP terminal program for Linux.
On May 10, 2005, Sun Microsystems announced that it would acquire Tarantella for $ 25 million. Tarantella was then incorporated as a business unit and SGD-TSE was transferred to Propalms Ltd. resold.
The database manufacturer Oracle , which took over Sun Microsystems at the beginning of 2010, continues the product as Oracle Secure Global Desktop and in 2013 presented the new version 5.0.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Oracle Secure Global Desktop Enhances Application Mobility in the Enterprise . In: Press release , Oracle, April 30, 2013.