Corel Taps IBM Veteran As CEO

Current CEO Amish Mehta will become chairman, the Ottawa-based software vendor said.

An Ontario native, Dobson most recently was corporate vice president of strategy at IBM, where he led the IT giant's Emerging Business Opportunity program. At IBM, he also had served as general manger for the Printing Systems Division and held marketing and finance jobs at IBM's Personal Systems Group and IBM Canada.

Corel, which made its name in PC graphics software, was bought by Vector Capital in August 2003. Its product portfolio includes CorelDraw, Paint Shop digital imaging software and the WordPerfect Office productivity suite. The company is positioning the latter offering as "the branded alternative" to Microsoft Office.

Last fall, Corel also rolled out a rebate program to attract system builders to WordPerfect Office from Microsoft Office.