In the early 1980s they began to chase new markets by diversifying into various digital technologies, and the pair seemed to have the Midas touch when most of those projects took off.Īll seemed to be going well until the mid-1980s. The darlings of the Canadian investment community, Cowpland and Matthews grew rich. Laboring in Cowpland's garage in Ottawa, the pair achieved their goal and went on to build one of Canada's most successful private telecommunications products companies.Ĭowpland and Matthews realized stunning success with Mitel during the 1970s and early 1980s, doubling sales of its advanced telephone switching equipment every year for ten straight years. They launched the tiny company with the hope of creating a device that could translate the pulses generated by rotary dial telephones into the tones created by touch-tone phones. In 1973 the pair left Bell to form a new venture dubbed Mitel (an abbreviation for Mike and Terry Electronics). at Carleton University while working as a research and development engineer at the respected Bell-Northern Research Ltd.Ĭowpland worked at Bell-Northern with Terry Matthews, a friend who also had emigrated from the United Kingdom. There, he earned a master's degree and finally a Ph.D. Cowpland was born in Sussex, England, in 1943 and received his bachelor of engineering degree from Imperial College in London.

Cowpland, and is seven percent owned by Novell.Ĭorel is the offspring of Michael Cowpland, a high-energy entrepreneur and Ottawa celebrity who is credited with founding two of Canada's most successful high-technology ventures: Corel and the earlier Mitel. Corel markets its products in more than 15 different languages in approximately 70 countries. in 1996, as well as Internet applications for home and business customers. Aside from its graphics software, the company also develops and markets WordPerfect business productivity software, having purchased the WordPerfect division from Novell Inc. Corel's signature product is CorelDRAW, a graphics software package with sales that reached ten million copies in 1999. Corel Corporation is one of the world's largest developers of business productivity, graphics, and operating systems solutions.

Corel software