Posted 28/02/2000 11:16am by Graham Lea
Cowpland sees share price upside for Corel
Will Corel now be able to mount a serious challenge to Microsoft's entrenched
dominance, now that it has merged with tools vendor Inprise/Borland? CEO Michael
Cowpland thinks so, as he told The Register in an interview at CeBIT.
Corel has made remarkable if rocky progress from the days when it was best known
as a graphics package vendor to its present position with the WordPerfect office
suite, which it acquired from Novell in a fire sale, and now Inprise/Borland and its
tools.
However, Corel's most successful move, and one that cost very little, has been to
Linux - at least Corel shareholders think so, since it was this that made the Borland
deal possible by driving up the share price. The Linux version of Corel's Office suite is
in its second beta and should start being distributed in April - and it will include
Paradox for Linux.
The big announcement is that Delphi for Linux - a product much requested by
developers and codenamed Kylix - is expected to be ready in September: at the
moment it is approaching the first beta, Cowpland said. J-Builder for Linux will also be
produced. The Borland merger will present some cultural problems between the
Canadians and the Californians, but Cowpland said there was no expectation of
moving everyone to Ottawa, as eventually happened with WordPerfect.
Not every Corel move has worked - the attempt to produce a Java version of
WordPerfect was tried too soon and foundered, but this did not lead to the
disbandment of the team, Cowpland says the've been busy looking at possibilities
with Enterprise Java Beans, to match or exceed ActiveX within a year. Cowpland was
optimistic that a good component model for e-commerce on the server will emerge.
Ventura Publisher - the grandpa of desktop publishing packages - was acquired by
Corel in 1993 and has languished somewhat, although it still has its devotees and
particular strength for handling large documents. It has not been a great money
spinner in its own right, and was first tucked away as a module in Corel Draw,
although a stand-alone version was subsequently produced. Cowpland said it has
now been decided to release a Linux version, which could bring it to greater
prominence. Corel is also currently looking into Web authoring tools, but there is
unlikely to be any return to hardware development as this would be done through
affiliates or partners.
Worrying about the governments
Corel has been having some success convincing governments to follow competitive
tendering rules for office suite software. The first victory was in Canada, with Corel
winning substantial damages when a contract was awarded to Microsoft without a
tender possibility. A similar case is pending in the US against the US Department of
Labor. Cowpland said that as a result of these actions, people were being "more
careful" now about competitive tendering. He also noted that the French department of
culture has decided to go to open source software.
Cowpland pointed out that in the last quarter of 1999, Red Hat made $5.4 million and
had a market capitalisation of around $11 billion, whereas Corel's $3.2 million of
Linux sales (in six weeks) was achieved with a market cap nearer $1 billion: whether
this points to considerable upside potential for the Corel share price will need to await
further results this quarter. Corel will be scrutinised very closely in the weeks ahead to
see if its muscles develop as might be reasonably expected.
On the competitive front, Cowpland said that Star Division seemed to be only "80
percent there", while the Lotus suite had a very low profile. As to the marketing of the
WP suite, Cowpland noted that when Corel scores some modest success against
Microsoft Office, Microsoft tends to use a giant hammer to squash the recalcitrant
OEM, but Corel will use "guerilla marketing under the radar" to attack Microsoft's
market. He said he expected to be able to announce some additional OEM deals for
the WordPerfect suite soon: the only major one so far has been for 20 million
motherboards made by PC Chips. © |
