Xara was founded way back in 1981 in Berlin with its original name Computer Concepts Ltd. The name was changed to Xara in 1995 and thereafter to The Xara Group Ltd. In the year 2016 iXara Ltd was also started which explored the cloud based developments and both companies were to become subsidiaries of Xara GmbH. In 1995 they also started Xara Networks Ltd which specialised in providing high bandwidth internet to companies and ISP. ITG group in London finally bought it and it was called Global Internet and subsequently it became GX Networks.

Xara Competes With CorelDRAW in 1995

Since 1990 Xara had been developing for Microsoft Windows 95 operating system as Acorn Computers. In 1994 Artworks which was completely rewritten from scratch for Windows 95 and released it as Xara Studio. This achievement was by just 20 odd programmers who worked relentlessly for over 2 years. The Xara Studio became the first competitor to the reigning software CorelDRAW. The Coral company from Canada did a smart thing. They bought the marketing rights to the Xara Studio and released it as CorelXARA and sold it as a web oriented companion to CorelDRAW. Later Xara cut their ties with Corel and started releasing the software themselves as Xara X in the year 2000 and there after kept releasing new versions of the software in 2004 as Xara Xtreme and  in 2005 they released it as Xara Photo & Graphics Designer. In 2006 Xara released the same software with more power as Xara Xtreme Pro and later on they released an even more powerful version called Xara Xtreme Pro which they renamed with a better name Xara Designer Pro. Concurrently Xara released, Xara 3D Maker, Page and Layout Designer, Xara Web designer etc and has a good market share today.

Xara Cloud

Xara spends a lot of money and time in Research and Development. In 2015 Xara came out with Xara Cloud SaaS (SaaS means Software as a Service). This was a very innovative idea. They released as Xara Online Designer as a beta. And two years later Xara Cloud was released in 2018. Xara Cloud is an integrated Software service that needs just the internet and a browser. Xara Cloud can be used to create, edit and share a range of business documents ina web browser using any device like a computer, notebook, tablet, laptop, smart phone etc. Xara Cloud is mostly template based so that a designer or a user need not start designing from scratch. The user can get hundreds and hundreds of predesigned templates which can be customised with drag and drop method. There are hundreds of categories with thousands of document templates to chose from so that the user can get their work done quickly and without hiring any designer thereby saving huge amounts of money.

 

Xara had an office in Hemel Hempstead in Britain. Xara has developed many software for many computing platforms which includes Microsoft Windows, Linux, BBC Micro etc. And now Xara is involved in browser based services of which Xara Cloud is the ultimate which allows a user to work seemlessly on a computer or phone or any device that supports a browser because Xara Cloud is Web based online software which needs just a web browser and internet to work with. All the features of the Xara software is now available online without large downloads or installing huge software that uses up all the system resources. This means the hardware requirement is so less to run Xara that even a two decade old computer running any operating system can be used to work on Xara.