The INQUIRER Top 5 Utah Tech Firms

IT GAVE THE WORLD Marie Osmond and her toothy brothers, Jell-O, Butch Cassidy, great skiing, Mormonism, Roseanne Barr and part of the Rocky Mountains, but Utah also has a proud technology history as I was reminded earlier this week when researching a story about Mozy, the online storage service that is thought to be a target for EMC.

It’s not Silicon Valley but the fast-growing, very youthful 45^th state of the republic has made some big contributions to the computer industry.

Here are five of them:

5. Lindon-based Altiris carved out a nice niche in deployment and other management tools so the inevitable happened - Symantec bought it.

4. Orem-based Omniture is one of the hottest companies in web analytics powering a ton of brand-name dotcom firms. The firm went public last year and is now biggest of a wave of new Utah tech firms that also includes FatPipe Networks.

3. Caldera. Ray Noorda owned a chunk of Caldera through his Canopy Group investment firm that was set up after he left Novell. After becoming one of the bigger names in open source software, Caldera merged with SCO with the plan being to combine SCO Unix with Caldera’s Linux. Then Caldera decided SCO was a better brand to keep and we all know what happened after that. Noorda famously travelled economy on business flights and Bill Gates accused him of having a “vendetta” against Microsoft. He died in orem last year, aged 82.

2. Novell. Novell went into the 1990s with the lion’s share of the fledgling network operating system business but managed to louse up the franchise with a series of wrong moves including the Digital Research and WordPerfect acquisitions. Windows NT munched through NetWare and the company’s latest plan is based on Suse Linux and security and management tools. No longer based in Utah, Novell is now headquartered in Massachussetts. The company was named as a misspellling of the French word for "new", according to popular lore.

1. WordPerfect. Originally written for Data General computers, the eponymous word processor became the DOS standard. However, like a lot of folks it missed the ship on Windows and never recovered. The company was acquired by neighbouring Novell in 1994. It was founded by Bruce Bastian, and his faculty advisor at Brigham Young University, Alan Ashton.

After the Novell deal, Ashton founded Thanskgiving Point, a community project in Lehi, Utah. Bastian is a philanthropist and has been outspoken on the subject of gay rights. "To be a gay person among Democrats is not a big deal," Bastian was quoted as saying in a 2003 article. "But to be a gay Democrat among other people in Utah, not only are you stupid but you are wicked, too.”

Sales and marketing chief Pete Peterson wrote the story of the company in Almost Perfect. Recalling the day Ashton and Bastian asked him to take a reduced role, he writes, “Although their decision hurt much more than I expected, I promised myself they would not see me cry. I hugged them both, wished them well, grabbed a few of my things, and left.” µ