by
Brian Madden
Several years ago there was an add-on product that gave many Citrix-like functions to Terminal Server called New Moon Canaveral iQ. This was a cool little product although no one really used it.
In May 2003, New Moon was bought by Tarantella. (Coverage of this was actually my first blog entry ever—Doc ID# 1.) Tarantella released Canaveral iQ 2.0 and then changed the name of the product to “Secure Global Desktop, Terminal Server Edition” (SGD-TSE) for the 2.1 release. They cranked out a few new versions over the next few years, although they struggled as a company and were ultimately bought by Sun Microsystems in May of 2005 for 90 cents a share.
A few months later (in July 2005), Sun licensed the source code and distribution rights of SGD-TSE to the parent company of the European SGD-TSE distributor, Propalms. According to the press release, "Propalms will assume all of Tarantella's current TSE customer obligations, and Tarantella's TSE development team will join Propalms immediately." It also mentioned that "Propalms has the option to purchase certain of [sic] the TSE intellectual property outright at a future date." It seems that Propalms is on the “rent-to-own” plan for SGD-TSE.
Propalms appears to be a pretty unknown company, and a Google search for "Propalms" at the time of the acquisition turned up the Tarantella press release as the first result and no other relevant websites. The contact email address for Propalms is at “arctech.co.uk” which is the UK distributor of Tarantella's products, but there is no other mention of the license agreement or "Propalms" on that site.
In addition to the SGD-TSE product, it appears that Propalms got Tarantella’s old website from Sun. They pretty much copied the site over directly, as many of the links on it point back to Tarantella.com or simply don’t work. All of the download links still point to Tarantella.com, and the case studies and customers pages still have Tarantella plastered all over them.
Tarantella's old homepage
Propalm's new homepage
The bottom line, though, is that hopefully Propalms will be able to get their name out there and try to appease some of the fears that have been floating around about the future of the SGD-TSE product. With luck they'll be around long enough to be on the next version of the SBC Software Roundup.
We reviewed Tarantella SGD-TSE 4 (which is now what Propalms has) last January.
The Timeline
| 1999 |
New Moon is founded |
| May 2003 |
Tarantella buys New Moon |
| June 2003 |
Tarantella releases New Moon Canaveral iQ 2.0 for $100 per user |
May 2004
|
Tarantella changes the product name to Secure Global Desktop, Terminal Server Edition (SGD-TSE), releases version 2.1, lowers price to $60 per user |
| August 2004 |
Arc Technology Distribution becomes the European distributor of SGD-TSE
|
| December 2004 |
Tarantella releases SGD-TSE version 4.0 (there was no version 3) |
| May 2005 |
Sun buys Tarantella for $25M (or 90 cents per share). |
| July 2005 |
Sun licenses SGD-TSE to UK-based ProPalms (parent company of Arc) |
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