Who owns corel wordperfect

I would expect you're going to see some housecleaning. Clearly, this is a company that hasn't had a workable business plan for a long time, and there are clearly going to have to be changes for it to be a successful company going forward.

Todd R. Weiss is an award-winning technology journalist and freelance writer who worked as a staff reporter for Computerworld from to Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here. More from the IDG Network. Corel markets its products in more than 15 different languages in approximately 70 countries.

The company is led by its founder, Dr. Michael C. Cowpland, and is seven percent owned by Novell. Corel is the offspring of Michael Cowpland, a high-energy entrepreneur and Ottawa celebrity who is credited with founding two of Canada's most successful high-technology ventures: Corel and the earlier Mitel.

Cowpland was born in Sussex, England, in and received his bachelor of engineering degree from Imperial College in London. In he emigrated to Canada. There, he earned a master's degree and finally a Ph. In the pair left Bell to form a new venture dubbed Mitel an abbreviation for Mike and Terry Electronics. They launched the tiny company with the hope of creating a device that could translate the pulses generated by rotary dial telephones into the tones created by touch-tone phones.

Laboring in Cowpland's garage in Ottawa, the pair achieved their goal and went on to build one of Canada's most successful private telecommunications products companies. Cowpland and Matthews realized stunning success with Mitel during the s and early s, doubling sales of its advanced telephone switching equipment every year for ten straight years. The darlings of the Canadian investment community, Cowpland and Matthews grew rich.

In the early s they began to chase new markets by diversifying into various digital technologies, and the pair seemed to have the Midas touch when most of those projects took off.

All seemed to be going well until the mids. It was in , though, that Mitel's diversification effort suddenly began to look like a miscalculation. Significantly, Cowpland and Matthews fell behind schedule on the development of a state-of-the-art phone switch called the SX Mitel began losing money, and Cowpland and Matthews were compelled to sell the enterprise to British Telecom.

Still, both founders walked away with millions in cash. Undeterred, Cowpland viewed the sale of Mitel as an opportunity to pursue the development of technology that was of greater interest to him at the time and to escape a job that had become an administrative burden.

His initial goal was to develop a better laser printer that could be used with personal computers. He found that it was too difficult to compete in that market with low-cost Asian manufacturers, however, and quickly shifted his strategy.

Corel soon became a value-added reseller of computers, selling complete systems geared for desktop publishing tasks. Cowpland scrambled during his first few years to find a role for Corel in the marketplace. He eventually added optical disk-drives to his desktop publishing system lineup and then started marketing local area networks. While he pushed his value-added hardware, Cowpland labored behind the scenes on what became a pet project: the creation of software that offered better design and layout capabilities than were offered by leading applications of the time.

To that end, he hired a crack software development team that he allowed to work relatively autonomously. Before the end of the decade, the team had developed a graphic arts software package that would become the standard for the PC-based desktop publishing industry.

CorelDRAW, significantly, was the first graphics application to incorporate into one package all of the major graphics functions: illustration, charting, editing, painting, and presentation. CorelDRAW was an instant success, which was surprising given the fact that Corel had never mass-marketed anything, much less a software application.

Cowpland's savvy marketing strategy, however, eventually earned him almost as much respect in the software community as did CorelDRAW. Cowpland plowed millions of dollars into an aggressive sales campaign. Most software companies at the time started out focusing almost solely on English-speaking consumers.

Furthermore, as CorelDRAW became more popular, Cowpland refused to adhere to the convention of selling different versions of the program one after the other. Instead, Corel developed and simultaneously sold multiple versions of CorelDRAW, each of which was tailored for a select market niche.

At the time, representatives of Corel declined to comment, although our sources inside the company indicated that the reports were not inaccurate. But, we now have a copy of the memo provided by an internal source that has been sent out to staff announcing that the deal has indeed closed, and that Corel is now officially part of the KKR family of companies.

First will be expanding operations for the existing business: Corel is the company behind a number of longstanding software brands including WordPerfect, Corel Draw, WinZip, PaintShop Pro.

Second will be making acquisitions and the sheer proliferation of promising startups in the last decade dedicated to all variety of apps and other software that may have found it a challenge to scale means Corel could have rich pickings.