Industry | |
---|---|
Founded | 1995 |
Founder | Ray Noorda |
Headquarters | , United States of America |
Key people |
|
The Canopy Group is an American investment and property management firm founded by Ray Noorda in 1995 through the Noorda Family Trust. It is headquartered in Lindon, Utah. At various times it has consisted of, or been known as, Canopy Technologies, Canopy Properties, and Canopy Ventures.
The Canopy Group served as the parent company of various start-up technology companies. It was one of the first venture capital firms in the Utah area and, investing in over a hundred such companies, became a pioneer in the Utah high-technology space. One of the most well-known companies it invested in was The SCO Group. Canopy divested itself of SCO in 2005 with the settlement of the Yarro case.
In 2011, Canopy's technology venture arm was purchased by Signal Peak Ventures. Today, Canopy provides real estate and rental space to high-tech companies.
As its chief executive during the 1980s and early 1990s, Ray Noorda had taken the software company Novell to a dominant position in the network operating system space [1] and in so doing became a personal computer industry pioneer. [2] As a result, Noorda had a reported worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. [3] [4] He was one of the richest people in the state of Utah. [4]
The origins of the Canopy Group date to 1992, when Noorda created NFT Ventures as an arm of the Noorda Family Trust. [3] NFT Ventures invested in a number of firms and helped to guide them. [3] Through NFT Ventures and other means, Noorda had invested in several dozen start-up firms overall by 1995. [5] In part, Noorda was interested in the venture capital business as a way to increase the funds that he could donate to Noorda Family Trust charities, [6] but he was also interested in making his home state of Utah a place where entrepreneurs could thrive. [7]
Noorda retired from Novell in 1994. [8] In 1995, The Canopy Group was founded as a venture capital firm. [1] [9] (Some sources place the founding of the Canopy Group as having happened in 1992, [10] but this may be a reference to the predecessor origins.) Venture capitalists were relatively uncommon at the time in Utah, [11] for reasons both geographic and cultural. [12]
Some of Noorda's investments were in technologies or strategies that he thought Novell should be involved in but was not, [1] or were in companies whose products supported Novell's products or vice versa. [8] These companies included Coresoft Technologies, KeyLabs Inc., Vinca Corp., and Helius Inc. [8] Another early Canopy Group investment was Nombas, [13] which unlike the others was located in the eastern portion of the country. [8] In addition the ups and downs of Novell's fortunes led to executives or projects departing it and new companies being formed, some of which Canopy funded. [9]
Subsequently the Canopy Group shifted its Novell-specific focus to one that was more geared towards open source software and network infrastructure projects in general. [1] Noorda had an early interest in the potential of Linux and Canopy financed Caldera, Inc. starting in 1995. [6] He subsequently financed several other Linux-related companies as well, [2] such as Lineo and Linux Networx. [1] Noorda and Canopy would still maintain an interest in some Novell affairs, however: in March 1988 the group's webpage indicated that the Novell Family Trust's 7.37 percent of Novell shares would be voted to withhold approval from most of the Novell board of directors running for re-election. [14]
In June 1995, Noorda announced the creation of Canopy Technologies, which would provide marketing, distribution, and management services to small software companies. [5] [3] [15] An early client of Canopy Technologies was Caldera, Inc. [5] Canopy Technologies, which was based in Orem, Utah, would use an outsourcing model and take advantage of Noorda's network of firms and know-how. [15] In 1996, Canopy Technologies, in league with Bain Capital, placed a bid to buy the WordPerfect division from Novell [16] (the head of Canopy Technologies was Craig Bradley, a former WordPerfect executive). [3] However, Corel Corporation's bid was accepted instead. [17]
In 1996, Ralph J. Yarro III was named as the general manager of The Canopy Group. [10] [9] By 1998, the Canopy Group was invested in 24 different companies which in turn employed a total of around 1,000 people. [12] Noorda became Utah's most prominent venture capitalist. [4] However unlike many venture capital firms, the Canopy Group under Noorda was not focused on reaching an exit strategy for its investments; instead, Yarro, said, Noorda "does it because he enjoys it, and he has the ability, both intellectually and financially, to pull it off." [12] By the early 2000s, the Canopy Group had invested in dozens of companies, [10] with 35 firms on its active roll as of 2003. [18]
Besides investments and management activities, the Canopy Group was also active in provided buildings for technology companies to host their offices in. [19] Their campus for these buildings was in Lindon, Utah. [19] While some of the tenants of these buildings were companies Canopy had invested in, including the data center provider ViaWest, over half of the tenants were not related to Canopy. [19]
One of the Canopy Group's tenants, and a company they had 43 percent ownership of, was The SCO Group. [18] This was the renamed form of Caldera International with a new management team and approach. [1] [2] By 2003, the SCO Group was receiving large amounts of attention due to the SCO v. IBM lawsuit and the surrounding SCO–Linux controversies, [20] in which it said that Linux had infringed upon the intellectual property rights of the Unix operating system that the SCO Group owned via its predecessor company The Santa Cruz Operation. [2] [11] Much of industry opinion was against the SCO Group's legal actions. [21] In particular reaction from the free and open source software community was intense and the SCO Group soon became, as Businessweek headlined, "The Most Hated Company In Tech". [22]
As majority owner in the SCO Group with two seats on SCO's board, the Canopy Group received substantial criticism as well. [23] [2] [11] For instance, in July 2003, Fortune magazine emphasized the role that the Canopy Group was playing and called Yarro the "mastermind" behind the SCO v. IBM action. [18] Columnist Frank Hayes of Computerworld examined how the SCO Group was acquiring Vultus Inc., another company controlled by Canopy, and concluded that Canopy was playing "a shell game ... to move its companies around" in order to exploit and cash in on the SCO Group's rising stock price. [23] And in October 2013, a New York Times story said that Canopy "has played an important role ... in shaping SCO's legal strategy" and quoted Laura Didio, analyst for the Yankee Group, as saying "All roads lead to Canopy. They've been pretty clever in the way they've played this." [2]
Canopy Group companies had been involved in two earlier legal actions, the winning Caldera v. Microsoft suit, which resulted in a favorable settlement in the neighborhood of $250 million, [18] as well as a successful action on behalf of its Center 7 company against Computer Associates. [2] Yarro said, "Intellectual property is everything. It's like location in real estate." [18] But he reported that back in his home area in Utah, "I have had friends, good friends, tell me they can't believe what we're doing." [22] So to criticism regarding its role with the SCO Group, Yarro said, "I know I've been painted in a rough light. I hope that our companies are our legacy and not our lawsuits." [2]
Even when he was with Novell, Noorda had begun experiencing some memory lapses, a condition that was confirmed publicly at the time. [24] By 2004, the 80-year-old Noorda was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and a bitter fight broke out between Noorda family members and Canopy Group executives. [4]
On 17 December 2004, Noorda and other shareholders ousted chief executive Yarro, chief financial officer Darcy Mott, and corporate counsel Brent Christensen, accusing them of having taken amounts of at least $25 million from Canopy Group through "a series of self-dealing and wasteful transactions". [10] Yarro and the other executives sued in the Utah District Courts for $100 million for wrongful termination, claiming that Noorda had been unduly influenced, and Canopy countersued the three men. [10] [11] Each of the opposing parties in the lawsuits accused the other of taking advantage of Noorda's diminished state. [21]
On 8 March 2005, the day before initial hearings were scheduled to begin, both parties negotiated a settlement out of court, ending the litigation. [20] Yarro, Mott, and Christensen remained terminated, but an undisclosed amount of money was paid by the Canopy Group to them. [20] Canopy agreed to relinquish ownership of all its 5.49 million shares in The SCO Group, transferring them to Yarro along with an undisclosed sum of money. [20] Yarro thus became The SCO Group's largest shareholder, owning about a third of it, and kept his title as chairman of its board. [20] While SCO remained a tenant in a Canopy Group building, there was no further connection between the two firms. [20] Yarro, Mott, and Christensen resigned from any other Canopy companies they had been involved with. [6]
Outside of Utah, much of the news of the conflict and settlement was filtered through its possible effect on the SCO Group and SCO's battle against Linux. [6] [21]
But locally, there was an acute additional sense of loss around the conflict. [11] There was the scene of people squabbling amidst a computer industry pioneer's prolonged decline. [25] [11] And, as the Salt Lake Tribune wrote, "Suicides have ended up becoming the tragic bookends for the bitter struggle to control Utah's Canopy Group." [25] The first was when Robert L. Penrose, Canopy's director of information systems and technology, died of suicide in December 2004, days after becoming distraught at the ouster of Yarro and the others, and the second was when Ray Noorda's daughter Val Noorda Kreidel, one of the major participants in the lawsuits, died of suicide in March 2005, less than a week after the settlement was reached. [25] Looking at the whole situation, the CEO of Altiris, once a Canopy company, said, "Is this a tragedy or not? Ray Noorda and Canopy ... were key to our success. In 1998, they took the risk and invested in a little company out in Lindon, Utah, when [others] would not." [11]
Following Yarro's removal from the Canopy Group, Canopy subsequently appointed John Noorda and Andy Noorda, Ray Noorda's sons, to the Canopy Board of Directors. Following those appointments, John Noorda and Andy Noorda assumed control of the Canopy Group. William Mustard took over as CEO of the Canopy Group. [26] However, there was little public activity for the next year or so, [26] and companies with Canopy investments were unsure of what the future held. [11] There were doubts expressed by some industry observers that the Canopy Group would even survive. [11]
The Canopy Group at one point owned a 5.7 percent stake in Trolltech, the company which developed the Qt toolkit. After a round of investments, they withdrew those investments. [27] Canopy also divested itself of interests in Altiris by 2005. [11]
They then hired Ron Heinz of Canopy portfolio company Helius, a provider of satellite Internet technology, as managing director. Prior to his stint at Helius, Heinz was formerly the head of North American Sales for Novell and was responsible for building one of the Canopy Group's profitable ventures. [28] Brandon Tidwell became the other managing partner. [29] Under this new leadership, the group looked to revitalize its portfolio, take a more public role towards early seed funding, and actively invest in Utah high technology companies and their development again. [26] [30]
Accordingly, around 2006, Canopy Venture Partners was created. [30] This entity launched the Canopy Ventures I portfolio of companies, [30] which invested in software and other technology companies in the Web 2.0 and network security spaces among others. [29] In September 2006 the Canopy Group made a major investment in Solera Networks, a network security forensics firm founded in 2004 and headed by former Caldera and Lineo co-founder Bryan Sparks; it was the first investment of any significance that Canopy had made in two years. [31]
Ray Noorda died in October 2006 after his long battle with Alzheimer's. [7] By then, the Canopy Group had invested in a total of over a hundred start-up companies. [7] And it was no longer unique, as a number of other important venture capital firms were operating in Utah as well. [11] [29]
In 2008, the Canopy Ventures II portfolio was announced. [29] This had a $100 million investment fund behind it, the largest in the Canopy Group's history, consisting of proceeds from the sale of Canopy Ventures I companies as well as new monies from the Noorda family. [29] Canopy Ventures II invested not just in the kind of computer-related technology companies it had in the past but also in technology-focused life sciences companies. [29] By 2011, the two portfolio funds had invested in a total of eighteen companies and exited from six of them, and according to Heinz the companies involved had gotten through the Great Recession reasonably well. [32]
In 2011, the Canopy Group decided to exit the venture capital business and focus solely on its building management and real estate holdings business. [32] Accordingly its technology venture arm was purchased by Signal Peak Ventures, a firm founded by Heinz, Tidwell, and others who had worked at Canopy Group. [33] Ten companies that had been funded by the Canopy Ventures portfolios moved over to funding from the new venture. [32] Signal Peak Ventures has continued operations into the 2020s. [34]
The Canopy Group had stayed active in the building space as well, deciding in 2005 to add a fifth building to its Lindon campus. [19] Canopy Properties, which employs Cushman & Wakefield for its building services, has continued on into the 2020s with its five-building campus in Lindon. [35]
The companies that the Canopy Group had investments in included the following:
Digital Research, Inc. was a privately held American software company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, DOS Plus, DR DOS and GEM. It was the first large software company in the microcomputer world. Digital Research was originally based in Pacific Grove, California, later in Monterey, California.
Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare.
United Linux was an attempt by a consortium of Linux distributors to create a common base distribution for enterprise use, so as to minimize duplication of engineering effort and form an effective competitor to Red Hat. The founding members of United Linux were SUSE, Turbolinux, Conectiva and Caldera International. The consortium was announced on May 30, 2002. The end of the project was announced on January 22, 2004.
SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp., commonly abbreviated as SCO v. IBM, is a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah. The SCO Group asserted that there are legal uncertainties regarding the use of the Linux operating system due to alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM. The lawsuit was filed in 2003, it has lingered on through the bankruptcy of SCO Group and the adverse result in SCO v. Novell, and was reopened for continued litigation by order of a new judge on June 14, 2013. Pursuant to the court order reopening the case, an IBM Motion for Summary Judgment was filed based upon the results of the Novell decision. On December 15, 2014, the judge granted most of IBM's motion, thereby narrowing the scope of the case, which remained open. On March 1, 2016, following a ruling against the last remaining claims, the judge dismissed SCO's suit against IBM with prejudice. SCO filed an appeal later that month. In February 2018, as a result of the appeal and the case being partially remanded to the circuit court, the parties restated their remaining claims and provided a plan to move toward final judgement. In 2021, the case finally ended in a settlement.
The SCO Group was an American software company in existence from 2002 to 2012 that became known for owning Unix operating system assets that had belonged to the Santa Cruz Operation, including the UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, and then, under CEO Darl McBride, pursuing a series of high-profile legal battles known as the SCO-Linux controversies.
Caldera International, Inc., earlier Caldera Systems, was an American software company that existed from 1998 to 2002 and developed and sold Linux- and Unix-based operating system products.
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants for Intel x86 processors: Xenix, SCO UNIX, and UnixWare.
UnixWare is a Unix operating system. It was originally released by Univel, a jointly owned venture of AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) and Novell. It was then taken over by Novell. Via Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), it went on to Caldera Systems, Caldera International, and The SCO Group before it was sold to UnXis. UnixWare is typically deployed as a server rather than a desktop. Binary distributions of UnixWare are available for x86 architecture computers. UnixWare is primarily marketed as a server operating system.
Raymond John "Ray" Noorda was a U.S. computer businessman. He was CEO of Novell between 1982 and 1994. He also served as chairman of Novell until he was replaced in 1994.
In a series of legal disputes between SCO Group and Linux vendors and users, SCO alleged that its license agreements with IBM meant that source code IBM wrote and donated to be incorporated into Linux was added in violation of SCO's contractual rights. Members of the Linux community disagreed with SCO's claims; IBM, Novell, and Red Hat filed claims against SCO.
SCO v. Novell was a United States lawsuit in which the software company The SCO Group (SCO), claimed ownership of the source code for the Unix operating system. SCO sought to have the court declare that SCO owned the rights to the Unix code, including the copyrights, and that Novell had committed slander of title by asserting a rival claim to ownership of the Unix copyrights. Separately, SCO was attempting to collect license fees from Linux end-users for Unix code through their SCOsource division, and Novell's rival ownership claim was a direct challenge to this initiative. Novell had been increasing their investments in and support of Linux at this time, and was opposed to SCO's attempts to collect license fees from Novell's potential customers.
Beginning in 2003, The SCO Group was involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. SCO initiated a series of lawsuits, the most known of which were SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell, that had implications upon the futures of both Linux and Unix. SCO claimed that Linux violated some of SCO's intellectual properties. Many industry observers were skeptical of SCO's claims, and they were strongly contested by SCO's opponents in the lawsuits, some of which launched counter-claims. By 2011, the lawsuits fully related to Linux had been lost by SCO or rendered moot and SCO had gone into bankruptcy. However the SCO v. IBM suit continued for another decade, as it included contractual disputes related to both companies' involvement in Project Monterey in addition Linux-related claims. Finally in 2021 a settlement was reached in which IBM paid the bankruptcy trustee representing what remained of SCO the sum of $14.25 million.
Ralph J. Yarro is an American business executive, entrepreneur and an activist. He co-founded Atua Ventures and was previously the CEO of the Canopy Group. Yarro has been associated with various technology companies, including Altiris, Caldera, Techcyte, Center 7, Lineo, Linux Networx, and Voonami.
DeviceLogics was a company in Lindon, Utah, USA, founded in November 2002. Originally doing business mostly under the DeviceLogics name, the company was incorporated as DRDOS, Inc. for legal reasons. The DeviceLogics name was later dropped.
Caldera OpenLinux is a defunct Linux distribution produced by Caldera, Inc. that existed from 1997 to 2002. Based on the German LST Power Linux distribution, OpenLinux was an early high-end "business-oriented" distribution that included features it developed, such as an easy-to-use, graphical installer and graphical and web-based system administration tools, as well as features from bundled proprietary software. In its era, Caldera OpenLinux was one of the four major commercial Linux distributions, the others being Red Hat Linux, Turbolinux, and SuSE Linux.
Stephen L. Norris is an American businessman, investor, and financier. He was one of the co-founders of The Carlyle Group, an American private equity firm. He was later owner and founder of Stephen Norris Capital Partners and the chairman of Gulf Capital Partners.
Caldera, Inc. was a Canopy-funded software company founded in October 1994 and incorporated on 25 January 1995 by former Novell employees Bryan Wayne Sparks, Ransom H. Love and others to develop the Caldera Network Desktop (CND) and later create a Linux distribution named OpenLinux (COL). The company was originally based in Provo and later in Orem, Utah, USA.
Xinuos is an American software company that was created in 2011. It was first called UnXis until assuming its current name in 2013. Xinuos develops and markets the Unix-based OpenServer 6, OpenServer 5, and UnixWare 7 operating systems under SCO branding. Xinuos formerly sold the FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10 operating system.
SCO Forum was a technical computer conference sponsored by the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), briefly by Caldera International, and later The SCO Group that took place during the 1980s through 2000s. It was held annually, most often in August of each year, and typically lasted for much of a week. From 1987 through 2001 it was held in Santa Cruz, California, on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The scenic location, amongst redwood trees and overlooking Monterey Bay, was considered one of the major features of the conference. From 2002 through 2008 it was held in Las Vegas, Nevada, at one of several hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. Despite the name and location changes, the conference was considered to be the same entity, with both the company and attendees including all instances in their counts of how many ones they had been to.
DR-WebSpyder is a DOS web browser, mail client and operating system runtime environment that was developed by Caldera UK in 1997. It was based on the DR-DOS operating system and networking components from Novell as well as the Arachne web browser by Michal Polák of xChaos software. The system was designed to run on low-end desktop systems, but being able to boot and execute from disk as well as from ROM or network, it was also tailored for x86-based thin clients and embedded systems with or without disk drives. Using the web browser as its principal user interface, it could be also used for kiosk systems and set-top boxes. It was ported to Linux in 1999 under the name Embrowser and was renamed Embedix Browser in 2000.