Phoenix Technologies Ltd.
 |
| Type |
Public (NASDAQ: PTEC) |
| Founded |
1979 |
| Headquarters |
Milpitas, California, United States |
| Industry |
Computer Software |
| Products |
BIOS: SecureCore, SecureCore Tiano, TrustedCore, AwardCore, AwardCore Tiano, MicroCore. Consumer products: FailSafe, HyperSpace, DriverAgent, BIOSAgentPlus, RegistryWizard, Undelete-Plus |
| Revenue |
▼$73.7 Million USD (2008) |
| Employees |
<150 |
| Website |
www.phoenix.com |
Phoenix Technologies Ltd (NASDAQ: PTEC) designs, develops and supports core system software for personal computers and other computing devices. Phoenix's products - commonly referred to as BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) or firmware - support and enable the compatibility, connectivity, security and management of the various components and technologies used in such devices. Phoenix Technologies and IBM developed the El Torito standard.
Phoenix sells its products primarily to computer and component device manufacturers. The company also provides training, consulting, maintenance and engineering services to its customers.
Phoenix also designs, develops and supports software products and services that provide PC users, especially mobile devices, with enhanced device utility, reliability and security. Phoenix's portfolio of products and services includes software that helps users to locate and manage portable devices that have been lost or stolen as well as software that allow certain applications to operate on the computing device independently of the device’s primary operating system.
Although the true consumers of these products and services are enterprises, governments, service providers and individuals, Phoenix typically licenses these products to OEMs and ODMs to assist them in making their products attractive to those end-users. [1]
Phoenix competes for sales primarily with in-house research and development (“R&D”) departments of PC and component manufacturers such as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Company, Toshiba Corporation, Apple Inc., and Intel. Phoenix also competes for sales with other independent suppliers, including American Megatrends Inc., a privately-held U.S. company, and Insyde Software Corp., a public company based and listed in Taiwan.
Phoenix was incorporated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in September 1979, and was reincorporated in the State of Delaware in December 1986. Headquarters are in Milpitas, California.
History
In 1979, Neil Colvin formed what was then called Phoenix Software Associates after his prior employer, Xitan, went out of business. Neil hired Dave Hirschman, a former Xitan employee. During 1980–1981, they rented office space for the first official Phoenix location at 151 Franklin Street, Boston, Massachusetts.
In this same time period Phoenix purchased a non-exclusive license for Seattle Computer Products 86-DOS. Phoenix developed customized versions of 86-DOS (or sometimes called PDOS for Phoenix DOS) for various microprocessor platforms. Phoenix also provided PMate as a replacement for Edlin as the DOS file editor. Phoenix also developed C language libraries, called PForCe, along with Plink-86, an overlay linker. These products only provided a small revenue stream to Phoenix during the early 1980s and the company did not significantly expand in size.
With the success of the IBM PC in 1983, Phoenix decided to provide an IBM PC compatible ROM BIOS to the PC market. A licensable ROM BIOS would allow clone PC manufacturers to run the same applications, and even the MS-DOS that was being used by IBM. However, to do this Phoenix needed a strategy for defense against IBM copyright infringement lawsuits. IBM would claim that the Phoenix programmers had copied parts of the IBM BIOS code published by IBM in its Technical Reference manuals.[citation needed] Due to the nature of low-level programming two well-written pieces of code that perform the same function there will inevitably be some degree of similarity. As such it would be impossible for Phoenix to defend itself on the grounds that no part of its BIOS matched IBM's. Phoenix developed a "clean room" technique that isolated the engineers who had been contaminated by reading the IBM source listings in the IBM Technical Reference Manuals. The contaminated engineers wrote specifications for the BIOS APIs and provided the specifications to "clean" engineers who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. Those "clean" engineers developed code from scratch to mimic the BIOS APIs. This technique provided Phoenix with a defensibly non-infringing IBM PC-compatible ROM BIOS. Because the programmers who wrote the Phoenix code had never read IBM's, nothing they wrote could have been copied from IBM's code, no matter how closely the two matched.[2] The first Phoenix PC ROM BIOS was introduced in May, 1984, and helped fuel the growth in the PC industry.
The availability of an IBM PC-compatible ROM BIOS helped fuel the 70% increase in sales that Phoenix experienced in 1988. Phoenix also developed IBM Personal System/2 Micro Channel BIOS, including the ABIOS, and EISA compatible BIOS during 1988 and 1989.
In 1987, Phoenix began the first of many expansion, acquisition, and collapse cycles. It acquired Softstyle, Inc, and Softset, Inc, and began a printer emulation product line, and a Phoenix publishing division. Phoenix also tripled the number of employees from late 1986 to 1989.
Stock
Phoenix launched an IPO in June 1988 and made the founder and early employees instant millionaires on paper. The stock price did not sustain its peak of 18¾, and by late 1989 it had plummeted to 3¾. In addition Phoenix posted a loss of 7.7 million dollars in 1989, due primarily to the consolidation of the PC market, and Phoenix's unsuccessful branching out into collateral markets. After that, Ron Fisher took over as CEO and Phoenix again focused on the core PC BIOS products, and prevented a hostile takeover bid by Norwood Partners Limited Partnership.
1990s – Expansion
By 1992 Phoenix was financially healthy enough to start another expansion and acquisition cycle. In 1992, Phoenix acquired Quadtel, a leading BIOS supplier. The Quadtel BIOS code base was newer than the original Phoenix ROM BIOS code base, and the development effort switched to the Quadtel products. It was rebranded as PhoenixBIOS. The original ROM BIOS code base was used on a joint development effort with David Keenan at IBM (called SurePath), but Phoenix did no further development work on the original code.
Phoenix also expanded its presence in foreign markets. In 1993 Phoenix acquired SRI KK, a Phoenix distributor, and formed the Phoenix KK Japanese subsidiary. In addition, the offices in Taipei, and Europe were expanded in size. In 1994, Phoenix acquired UK-based DIP Research and continued to expand European operations. In 1996, Phoenix acquired Virtual Chips, Inc., a maker of synthesizable cores for PC peripherals, and Mountain View, California-based Award Software in 1998. Due to this Phoenix reduced its global work force by 5% by ending 38 jobs.[3]
2001 – Consolidation
Phoenix continued to grow steadily from the late 1990s, and saw a significant increase in revenues from the Y2K product refreshes in the PC industry. However by mid 2001 the PC industry suffered another downturn, and Phoenix was forced to reduce the less profitable product lines, such as the IA64 effort, and close a number of redundant offices. Phoenix again focused on the core BIOS business for the next few years.
2003 – Expansion
During late 2002 and 2003, Phoenix began to develop specialized firmware-based applications. These applications often had components embedded in the BIOS that allowed them to function in damaged PC systems. These included security applications for password hiding and authentication, PC backup and recovery applications, and basic diagnostic applications. Several applications were obtained through complete acquisitions of other companies, such as the SPEKE technology from Integrity Sciences, or the browser technology from Ravisent.
The PC BIOS business continued its steady, but slow, growth despite a rapidly declining unit price. The Award product line was focused on the low-margin, high volume Desktop product line, while the Phoenix TrustedCore BIOS was primarily successful in the high-end PC systems, and Servers. The revenues from the BIOS business continued to provide the capital to invest further in the applications business.
2006 – Consolidation
By late 2005, it became clear that the BIOS revenues could not sustain the losses incurred by the applications business. The BIOS revenue stream was heavily leveraged through fully-paid-up licenses, and by early 2006 this business model was no longer sustainable. Phoenix announced some of the largest losses in the company history, and went through another consolidation cycle. Several offices were closed and over 70% of the employees were laid off. By late 2006, after senior management changes, the company refocused on the PC BIOS business and the couple of potentially profitable applications.
In September, the company named Woodson "Woody" Hobbs as president and CEO of Phoenix Technologies. Hobbs had a history of turning struggling companies around. According to company documents, "prior to joining Phoenix, Hobbs served as president and CEO of Intellisync Corporation from 2002 until the company's acquisition by Nokia in February 2006. Under Hobbs' leadership, Intellisync became the number two wireless email company, increased its stock price by nearly ten times, and grew enterprise value from zero to over $430 million." [4]
2008 – Acquisitions
By January 2008, Phoenix had posted higher-than-expected Q1 revenues and increased full year guidance.[5]
In 2008, Phoenix also acquired several companies to diversify its product line:
- In May, Phoenix acquired BeInSync, Ltd., an Israeli-based provider of an all-in-one solution that allows users to back up, synchronize, share and access data online. [6] Although Phoenix did not disclose the amount of the transaction, according to at least one online report, Phoenix acquired BeInSync for $25 million. [7]
- In July, in an effort to develop a strong online presence and infrastructure for web-based automated service delivery, Phoenix acquired Touchstone Software Corporation for its online PC diagnostics and software update technology, eSupport.com. The net value of the transaction was approximately $17 million. [8]
- In September, Phoenix acquired General Software of Bellevue, Wash. to extend its firmware leadership to a wide array of specialized high-value, high-margin devices that use embedded processors (embedded systems), from mobile and consumer electronics to data communications. [9]
Consumer products
FailSafe®
Phoenix FailSafe [1] is a theft-deterrence product and service that provides the ability to protect, track, and manage lost or stolen mobile computing devices and the data on those devices. PC owners can remotely retrieve and erase the content stored on their mobile PCs and remotely disable the device if necessary. Basic elements include a PC agent, an Internet-connected command and control center, and a Web-based management interface. [10]
With FailSafe, PC owners can often tell the location of their monitored PCs and they have the ability to "kill" their PCs with an SMS (text message) to protect their digital data subject to the restrictions mentioned above. [11] Lenovo uses the technology in its line of 2009 ThinkPad notebooks. [12]
HyperSpace
Phoenix HyperSpace™ [2] is a compact and reasonably secure Linux-based[13] application environment on the PC that runs side-by-side with an OS such as Microsoft Windows Vista. This environment enables PC users to benefit by having key productivity and lifestyle applications available instant-on in a very predictable fashion, while at the same time being able to run all of their Windows applications at full performance.
Benefits of HyperSpace include instant-on access to applications and a more secure environment less prone to viruses, malware and other external attacks that generally target Windows. Users still have access to their most-used applications, such as a Web browser and e-mail, even when Windows is booting, shutting down, on standby or has crashed. Users can press the 'F4' key to bypass Windows with Phoenix's fast boot technology. [14]
DriverAgent™
DriverAgent[3] is a driver update service and part of Phoenix's eSupport.com line. It scans PCs or notebooks and identifies hardware and outdated drivers with the help of a database containing over 1 million driver update files.
BIOSAgentPlus™
BIOSAgentPlus[4] updates the system BIOS and device drivers. BIOSAgentPlus is part of Phoenix's eSupport.com line.
RegistryWizard™
RegistryWizard [5] is an all-in-one tool for correcting errors in the PC's registry. RegistryWizard removes third party software that causes the system to run slowly. Consumers receive a complete registry report detailing harmful system conflicts and errors. RegistryWizard is part of Phoenix's eSupport.com line.
Phoenix Freeze™
Phoenix Freeze [6] is a solution for laptops and netbooks running Windows XP/Vista that combines with a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone to provide a proximity locking system. It will automatically lock down a laptop whenever a person walks away from it with a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone. When the smartphone returns within a certain proximity of the laptop that is pre-defined, it automatically unlocks the laptop. [7]
UndeletePlus
UndeletePlus [8]restores deleted files. It can also recover files that have been emptied from the Recycle Bin, permanently deleted files within Windows using the Shift + Delete shortcut, and files that have been deleted from within a Command Prompt. Users can also restore files that had been deleted from a flash memory drive. UndeletePlus is part of Phoenix's eSupport.com line.
See also
References
External links
