In August 2003, Vector Capital purchased all outstanding shares of Corel Corporation and took it private. Since that time, they polished up the company and claimed that it was profitable again.

Vector is well known for taking struggling companies private, fixing the problems and then taking them public again. If they do their job, Vector makes a very nice profit on the transaction.

Today it was announced that an initial public offering is in the works. In order to do this, Corel has to file a lengthy form with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). For those who really want to read all the details, here they are.

You will see that Corel’s revenues have increases and they have turned a nice profit since their numbers were last publically available. What is strange to me is that they still don’t so much as mention Ventura. It isn’t listed as a current product and isn’t listed as a discontinued product. You will see that WinZip is now part of Corel’s product portfolio. This isn’t a big surprise as Vector bought WinZip a few months ago. They had done the same thing with Jasc soon before Corel acquired Jasc.

What does this mean for end users? I think the short answer is that Corel is in a much better financial position than they were in back in 2003. We can only hope they have built a very good corporate platform that can launch their products forward. And of course, we hope that one of these days they’ll say something, anything, about Corel Ventura.