Tarantella was a line of products developed by a branch of the company

Santa Cruz Operation The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (usually known as SCO, pronounced either as individual letters or as a word) was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants ...

(SCO) since 1993. In 2001, SCO was renamed Tarantella, Inc. as it retained only the division that produced Tarantella. On July 13, 2005, Tarantella, Inc. was purchased by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, th ...

for

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

25,000,000. Tarantella exists now as a division of

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

. They produce and sell the '' Oracle Secure Global Desktop'' range of terminal services applications, formerly known as ''Sun Secure Global Desktop'', ''Tarantella'' and ''Canaveral iQ''.

History of the Tarantella product

In 1993,

acquired

IXI Limited IXI Limited was a British software company that developed and marketed windowing products for Unix, supporting all the popular Unix platforms of the time. Founded in 1987, it was based in Cambridge. The product it was most known for was X.deskto ...

, a software company in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge becam ...

, UK, best known for its X.desktop product. In 1994 it then bought

Visionware Visionware Ltd was a British software company that developed and marketed products that helped integration of Microsoft Windows clients to Unix-based server applications. It was based in Leeds in West Yorkshire. The three products it was most ...

, of

Leeds Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by populati ...

, UK, developers of XVision. In 1995 the development teams from IXI and Visionware were combined to form IXI Visionware, later the Client Integration Division of SCO. The Client Integration Division was relatively independent of the rest of SCO. Specialising in software to integrate

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

and UNIX systems, it retained its own web site for some time and ported its software to all major UNIX platforms including those of SCO's competitors. In 1997 the Client Integration Division released the Vision97 (later Vision2K) family of products: XVision Eclipse (a PC X server), VisionFS (an SMB server for UNIX), TermVision (a

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote termi ...

for Microsoft Windows), SuperVision (centralised management of users from Windows), SQL-Retriever (

ODBC In computing, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. A ...

-compliant database connectivity software, later dropped) and TermLite (a lightweight version of TermVision). The VisionFS product was developed from scratch by the Cambridge development team; the other products were developed by the Leeds development team (mostly new versions of the existing Visionware products). In parallel with Vision97 development, a separate development team began work in 1996 on a project codenamed Tarantella. The goal of this project was "any application, any client, anywhere": to provide access to applications of any type (hosted on back-end

server Server may refer to: Computing * Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and s ...

s) from any

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuable ...

device that supported a

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's most ...

-enabled

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

. The first Tarantella web site, with live demos of simple applications, appeared in December 1996. The project codename stuck: it became the final product name. The first public release of Tarantella software was in November 1997. Later version 1.x releases supported more application types (such as Microsoft Windows applications) and client types (including native clients to remove the dependency on Java support), and added scalability and security features to better support larger enterprises and secure application access over the Internet. The product was renamed Tarantella Enterprise II in late 1999, with a cut-down Tarantella Express product available on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which in ...

systems. This renaming was a simple rebrand of the then-current 1.x release: no version 2.x software was released. In April 2000 SCO reorganised into three divisions: the Server Software Division, the Professional Services Division and the Tarantella Division. At this time the web site moved from tarantella.sco.com to www.tarantella.com, reflecting the importance and independence of the Tarantella brand. In November 2000 version 3.0 of the product was released, including a major rewrite of much server-side code in the Java language. The product was rebranded as Tarantella Enterprise 3, with releases for Linux and major UNIX systems. Further 3.x releases followed in subsequent years, adding more integration features in competition with similar software from

Citrix Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. C ...

History of the Tarantella company

In 2001, having sold the UNIX business, the company renamed itself after its remaining product line. However, despite growth in sales, the company consistently failed to meet sales targets, citing the downturn in tech markets. Despite a well-regarded main product, the company was never profitable. The company laid off staff in 2001, 2002 and 2003. In 2003 the company lost compliance with regulations for continued listing on NASDAQ's SmallCap market. As a consequence it implemented a 1-for-5

reverse stock split In finance, a reverse stock split or reverse split is a process by which shares of corporate stock are effectively merged to form a smaller number of proportionally more valuable shares. A reverse stock split is also called a stock merge. The "r ...

. At the same time it bought New Moon Systems, developers of Canaveral iQ, a terminal services application for Microsoft Windows that competed directly with Citrix. The financial problems continued during 2003. In July, CEO Doug Michels stated that "isolated business practices" in the European Sales territory would affect revenues for the previous quarter. Later more discrepancies were found, causing a wider review of revenues for earlier quarters too. These reviews delayed the reporting of quarterly results, taking the company out of compliance with NASDAQ regulations once more. In September 2003 the Chairman of the Board (and former SCO CEO) Alok Mohan became acting Chief Financial Officer, replacing Randall Bresee. In the following month the company was delisted from NASDAQ and began trading "over the counter". Also in October the company received additional private investment. On December 11, 2003 Doug Michels was replaced as CEO by Frank Wilde. On January 6, 2004 John Greeley was appointed as the new CFO. More changes at the top of the organization followed in February: most members of the executive team were replaced. At the same time US$16 million of additional investment was received, and in March the company acquired Caststream, Inc., a provider of collaboration software. (Note that Caststream was run by several members of the management team that Frank Wilde brought with him.) In April the company began to comply once more with financial reporting obligations, and was seeking relisting. On May 10, 2004 the company rebranded. The former Tarantella Enterprise 3 and Canaveral iQ products became Secure Global Desktop, Enterprise Edition and Secure Global Desktop, Terminal Services Edition respectively. On May 10, 2005 it was announced that

would be acquiring Tarantella for $25 million cash, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval. Sun posted a letter to Tarantella customers indicating the company would be wholly assimilated after 90 days; on July 13, 2005, it was announced the acquisition was completed. In July, 2005 Sun licensed the Microsoft Windows Terminal Server based Tarantella product SGD-TSE (formerly New Moon Canaveral IQ) to the UK-based company ProPalms. ProPalms rebranded SGD-TSE as ProPalms TSE and ProPalms has released version 5.0 of the product. The ProPalms product directly competes as a lower cost alternative to Citrix Metaframe. Propalms assumed all of Tarantella's TSE customer obligations, and Tarantella's TSE development team joined Propalms. In July 2006 Tarantella moved from its location in Santa Cruz. The building is now occupied by Georgiana Bruce Kirby Preparatory School.

References

;Sources
Oracle Secure Global Desktop
;Notes {{reflist

External links

Sun Microsystems

Sun Secure Global Desktop product home page

Documentation Collection for version 4.31Propalms TSE
Companies based in Santa Cruz County, California Companies established in 1993 Software companies based in California Sun Microsystems acquisitions Sun Microsystems software Unix history Software companies of the United States

History of the Tarantella product

History of the Tarantella company

See also

References

External links