| Phoenix Technologies | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public (NASDAQ: PTEC) |
| Founded | 1979 |
| Headquarters | |
| Industry | Computer industry |
| Products | AwardBIOS |
| Revenue | ▼$60. A public company usually refers to a company that is permitted to offer its registered securities ( Stock, bonds, etc The NASDAQ (acronym of National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American Stock exchange. For other uses of this term see Industry (disambiguation An industry (from Latin industrius, "diligent industrious" Computer industry is a collective term used to describe the whole range of businesses involved in developing Computer software, designing Computer hardware and In Marketing, a product is anything that can be offered to a Market that might satisfy a want or need In Computing, the BIOS (ˈbaɪoʊs In business revenue or revenues is Income that a company receives from its normal business activities usually from the sale of goods and services 5 Million USD (2006) |
| Employees | 322 |
| Website | www.phoenix.com |
Phoenix Technologies Ltd (NASDAQ: PTEC) is a creator of computer BIOS software. The United States dollar ( sign: $; code: USD) is the unit of Currency of the United States; it has also been Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. Employment is a Contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. A website (alternatively web site or Web site, a back-construction from the Proper noun World Wide Web) is a collection of Web pages The NASDAQ (acronym of National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American Stock exchange. In Computing, the BIOS (ˈbaɪoʊs The chip which contains the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is located on the mainboard, and it initializes before the operating system, and helps the OS communicate with the hardware. A motherboard is the central or primary Printed circuit board (PCB making up a complex electronic system such as a modern Computer or Laptop An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination American Megatrends Incorporated (AMI) is the other major BIOS creator. American Megatrends Incorporated ( AMI) is a hardware and Software company headquartered in unincorporated Gwinnett County, Phoenix Technologies and IBM developed the El Torito standard. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology The El Torito Bootable CD Specification is an extension to the ISO 9660 CD-ROM specification
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Company history
In 1979, Neil Colvin formed what was then called Phoenix Software Associates after his prior employer, Xitan, went out of business. Technical Design Labs was an early producer of Personal computers The company's Xitan had an S-100 bus and a Z-80-based CPU 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. Seattle Computer Products (SCP was a Seattle Washington computer hardware company which was one of the first manufacturers of Computer systems based on the Intel 86-DOS was an operating system developed and marketed by Seattle Computer Products for its Intel 8086 -based computer kit Phoenix developed customized versions of 86-DOS (or sometimes called PDOS for Phoenix DOS) for various microprocessor platforms. DOS, short for "Disk Operating System" is a shorthand term for several closely related Operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a Central processing unit (CPU on a single Integrated Phoenix also provided PMate as a replacement for Edlin as the DOS file editor. Edlin is a Line editor included with MS-DOS and later Microsoft operating systems Phoenix also developed C language libraries, called PForCe, along with Plink-86, an overlay linker. tags please moot on the talk page first! --> In Computing, C is a general-purpose cross-platform block structured 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. Because, due to the nature of low-level programming, in two well-written pieces of code that perform the same function some correspondence is inevitable, 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. Clean room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique is the method of copying a design by Reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing 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. The first Phoenix PC ROM BIOS was introduced in May, 1984, and helped fuel the growth in the PC industry.
The availability of a 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. The Personal System/2 or PS/2 was IBM 's third generation of Personal computers The PS/2 line released to the public in 1987 was created by IBM in an The Extended Industry Standard Architecture (in practice almost always shortened to EISA and frequently pronounced "eee-suh" is a bus standard for IBM compatible
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. Initial public offering (IPO, also referred to simply as a "public offering" is when a company issues Common stock or shares to the public for the first The stock price did not sustain its peak of 18 3/4, and by late 1989 it had plummeted to 3 3/4. 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. Ronald D Fisher is the current Managing Director of Raytheon Australia and Vice-President of Raytheon International Inc and responsible for the executive
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 IBM (called SurePath(tm)), 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. Award Software International Inc was a BIOS manufacturer headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States. Due to this Phoenix reduced its global work force by 5% by ending 38 jobs. [1]
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. The Year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K) was a notable Computer bug resulting 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. Itanium is the brand name for 64-bit Intel Microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64) 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. SPEKE (Simple Password Exponential Key Exchange is a cryptographic method for Password-authenticated key agreement.
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 30% of the employees were laid off. By late 2006, after senior management changes, the company refocused on the PC BIOS business and the few potentially profitable applications.
References
- ^ "PHOENIX TO CUT 38 JOBS, TAKE CHARGE FOR RESTRUCTURE.. " Computergram International.
See also
External links
American Megatrends Incorporated ( AMI) is a hardware and Software company headquartered in unincorporated Gwinnett County,Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic