ON Technology Corporation was a

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

company in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. It was formed in 1987 by

Mitch Kapor Mitchell David Kapor ( ; born November 1, 1950) is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in deve ...

after his departure from

Lotus Software Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...

. The original plan of the business was to build an object-oriented PC desktop environment providing a variety of applications. In (roughly) the early 1990s, the company was acquired by Notework Corporation, a vendor of LAN email systems. The management of the merged company was the Notework Corporation management, but the company retained the ON Technology name (which management perceived had more cache/brand.) Subsequently, ON Technology performed a series of small product/company acquisitions to grow its product line, including additional email software (DaVinci, a

message handling system Message Handling System (MHS) is an important early email protocol developed by Action Technologies, Inc. (ATI) in 1986. Novell licensed it in 1988 then later bought it. Email clients A wide variety of email clients used MHS, including: * Para-M ...

-based email product), anti-virus technology, (corporate) Internet usage monitoring, IP firewall, and desktop systems management. The company went public in (approximately) 1995, providing an additional structural method to perform most of the acquisitions providing the products listed above. The company was unique in its go-to-market model, using a 30-day free trial model coupled with significant marketing and telesales to reach a large number of small- to medium-sized customers. In 1998, the company restructured its operations and sold off its "free-trial" small/medium business products to Elron Software. It retained "enterprise-sized" products (the MeetingMaker calendaring product and the ON Command CCM desktop systems management product) which it sold using a more traditional enterprise software business model. ON spun out the

Meeting Maker Meeting Maker is a cross-platform personal calendar and group scheduling software application from PeopleCube. First released in 1991 for Macintosh by ON Technology, support for other platforms followed in 1993 with Meeting Maker XP. Alongside Wi ...

product in a private transaction to a private investor, who eventually sold the technology to PeopleCube. The only remaining technology at this point was the systems management software, branded "CCM" at that time. ON was acquired by Symantec on October 27, 2003. to assist Symantec's move into the desktop systems management business.

References

Defunct software companies of the United States Gen Digital acquisitions {{US-software-company-stub de:ON Technology Corp.