Arcada Software

» see arcada.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Arcada Software was never an independent company, and almost everything written about it says otherwise. The prospectus Seagate filed to buy it puts the chain down plainly: Archive Software was set up as a division of Archive Corporation in July 1992, Conner Peripherals acquired Archive that December, restructured the software side into a division called Conner Software in January 1993, and then in November 1993 incorporated Arcada Holdings in Delaware to hold it. Conner owned about 79 percent of the result. There was no spin-out and no garage.

The minority came from a purchase. In January 1994 Arcada bought the software business of Quest Development Corporation for $8.5 million in cash and 7.6 million preferred shares, and Quest's Kevin Azzouz became president and a large shareholder of the thing that had bought him. The company ran from 37 Skyline Drive in Lake Mary, Florida, in forty thousand square feet of leased space, which is roughly the least Silicon Valley address a storage software business of that period could have had.

The product line was Backup Exec, first for Windows NT at the end of 1993 and then for NetWare, with Arcada Backup for Windows 95 following. Before those the products had been called MaynStream and QICStream, names which tell you exactly how close this business still was to the tape drive it grew out of. In July 1995 it picked up assets from Sytron for $4.5 million. Revenue went from $10.4 million in 1993 to $24.9 million in 1994, and the first nine months of 1995 alone brought in $42.7 million.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ whose name was on the box ~

Now the part worth stopping on. A large share of Arcada's work shipped under somebody else's brand. The prospectus lists, in a single sentence, backup utilities written for Microsoft to put into MS-DOS 6.0 and into Windows NT, alongside both the DOS and Windows versions of The Norton Backup for Symantec. IBM took PMTape and EZTape out of the same shop. If you used a PC in the middle 1990s and ever opened the backup program that came with the operating system, there is a reasonable chance you were running code that this company, or the division it was carved out of, had written in an office park in central Florida for a disk drive maker.

One correction belongs here, and it corrects this site as much as anyone. The backup applet that arrived with the first Windows NT on 27 July 1993 is routinely credited to Arcada, including in our own grave for it. Arcada did not exist in July 1993. That code came from the Archive and Conner Software line, and Arcada inherited the relationship four months later. The company did supply Microsoft with NT utilities, so the credit is close to right, but it is four months early and attached to a company that had not been incorporated yet.

There is nothing here for me to remember, which is exactly the condition the company built for itself. Conner's own grave on this site notes how little anybody thinks about the label on a hard disk; an OEM software supplier is a layer further down than that again. The entire commercial strategy was to be the thing inside the thing, sold to procurement departments rather than to anybody who would remember it. At the end of 1995 that strategy employed 406 people, 174 of them in research and development.

~ eleven days ~

Conner agreed to merge with Seagate on 20 September 1995, and that merger closed on 5 February 1996. Arcada's own deal had been signed in the meantime: a Reorganization Agreement dated 21 December 1995 between Seagate and Arcada, with Azzouz signing in his own right, under which everyone who was not Conner received 0.1545 of a Seagate share for each Arcada share, worth about $7.49 a share at mid-January prices. It was conditional on the Seagate and Conner merger completing first.

It did, and eleven days later Arcada's special meeting of stockholders approved its own. On the morning of 16 February 1996 the acquisition vehicle merged into Arcada Holdings and Arcada became a wholly owned subsidiary of Conner, which was by then a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate. It was folded together with Palindrome into Seagate Software's storage management group within weeks. By the capture of 14 January 1997, arcada.com was already serving a page titled Seagate Software Home Page.

The business kept being worth more than the name. Veritas agreed to buy Seagate Software's Network and Storage Management Group on 21 October 1998 and completed on 28 May 1999, and Veritas's own 10-K puts the total purchase price at $3,464.5 million against 155,583,486 shares issued. The widely repeated $1.6 billion is the announcement-day figure, not what it settled at. Backup Exec went from Veritas to Symantec in 2005 and back to a standalone Veritas in 2016. It sits with Arctera now. Several owners later it is still being sold, which is more than can be said for the disk drive company that started it.

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