Bob Mims of the Salt Lake Tribune has the story here, including this interesting detail:

"Sources within the Canopy corporate family reported that Mustard has been meeting this week with management of Canopy's numerous high-tech subsidiaries including Darl McBride, CEO of the controversial SCO Group."

I am told Bill Mustard comes from a consulting company called Smooth Engine. Their homepage says they do "Growth Consulting":

"Smooth Engine is an innovative and results-driven consulting firm that boasts an extraordinary team of former senior executives who come from a broad base of industries. The firm enables clients to become leaders in their field by empowering them with a wealth of management expertise, an impressive network of relationships and extensive experience achieving measurable, lasting growth."

One of the things they do is provide interim, as well as permanent, executives. "Smooth Engine leverages this network to help clients fill certain management needs, on either an interim or permanent basis," is how they put it. The company was founded in 2001. There is a PDF on the company and the personnel you can borrow or hire on the Consultants page.

Here is Mr. Mustard's biographical info:

William Mustard, Managing Director

Bill Mustard is an experienced, commercially savvy, senior executive whose strong analytical skills and capabilities were honed in high growth, dynamic, international environments particularly in telecommunications and media.

Prior to joining Smooth Engine, he was a senior executive in the entrepreneurial Stenbeck organization, most recently as the President and CEO of the privately-held US investment holding company which he built from scratch developing businesses on both a domestic and international basis. Startups were incubated, acquisitions and disposals made, and, the consulting and business units spun out. Businesses covered the sectors of television and media, technology with military electronics and telecoms R&D, call center operations, computer network systems integration, telecoms consulting and billing systems, and, transactions processing.

Additionally, Bill ran the global risk management and financial investigative business for all of the Stenbeck group companies and developed corporate governance provisions including work related to Sarbanes-Oxley.

He has been responsible for the design and execution of complex cross border transactions including disposals, reorganizations, restructurings and financings.

Bill’s professional foundation is in finance having been educated as an economist and trained as a chartered accountant while practicing with Ernst & Young in the UK, USA and Europe. He has provided corporate advisory and investigative services, consultancy and audit services to international private and public companies."

As for his prior work for the Stenbeck group, here is a 2001 article about Jan Stenbeck, who died the following year. Stenbeck Group is a Swedish company with some 250 subsidiaries worldwide.

By the way, if you are wondering about the new Caldera icon on the SCO homepage, it's not *that* Caldera. Notice it says "Software for Imaging"? Blanchard Systems uses that logo and that phrase in connection with its graphics product.

I told you today's teleconference was likely to be fascinating.