Corel
 |
|
Corel headquarters in Ottawa
|
|
| Private | |
| Industry |
Software Programming |
| Founded | 1985 |
| Founder | Michael Cowpland |
| Headquarters | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada |
|
Key people
|
James Baillie (Chairman) Patrick Nichols (CEO) Chris DeBiase (CFO) Grace Pura (CLO) |
| Products |
WordPerfect CorelDRAW WinZip PaintShop Pro AfterShot Pro WinDVD Painter |
| Revenue |
 268.2 million USD (2008) |
|
Number of employees
|
< 500 (2015) |
| Website | corel |
Corel Corporation (from the abbreviation "Cowpland Research Laboratory") is a Canadian software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, specializing in graphics processing. It is known for producing software titles such as CorelDRAW, and for acquiring PaintShop Pro, Video Studio and WordPerfect.
Corel was founded by Michael Cowpland in 1985, as a research laboratory. The company had great success early in the high-tech boom of the 1990s with the product CorelDRAW, and became, for a time, the biggest software company in Canada. In 1996 it acquired Novell WordPerfect and started competing with the thought of being "Pepsi to Microsoft's Coke" as Microsoft Word was the top-used word processing software at the time. Corel was in a difficult position as Microsoft pushed pre-loaded copies of its software onto new computers. This mainly consisted of Microsoft Works office applications, but a variant called Works Suite also bundled the Microsoft Word software.
The company held the naming rights to the home arena for the NHL's Ottawa Senators from February 1996 until January 2006 as the "Corel Centre", a venue currently known as the Canadian Tire Centre.
In 1997 Corel sold its Corel ChemLab studio and its "CD Home Collection" consisting of over 60 multimedia titles as well as the Corel ChemLab studio to Hoffmann + Associates, a Toronto-based company. As part of the deal, Corel acquired a minority interest in Hoffmann + Associates and received royalties.
In August 2000 Cowpland was accused of insider trading and left. A new board of directors was then appointed and Derek Burney Jr., announced that the product line would be split into several brands—DeepWhite, ProCreate, and Corel. However, these plans would be scrapped, and only the Corel brand would remain. Corel acquired the graphics software company Micrografx in late 2001.
...
Wikipedia