[5] Anderson found funding for IXI from sources in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, and Japan, but avoiding US investors as his prior experiences had made him leery of them.

[6] IXI's best-known product was X.desktop, an X11-based graphical desktop environment with finder and file management capabilities for Unix systems.

[9] There was an opportunity for such a product because when the X11 version of the X Window System came out in 1987, it made a point of separation of mechanism and policy[10] (indeed, it has been termed a canonical example of that design philosophy).

[12] The X.desktop product then came to be based on Motif toolkit from the Open Software Foundation (OSF),[13] a switch that happened in 1989 with release 2.0.

[16] OEM customers gained by 1990 included NCR Corporation, Dell, Uniplex, Parallel Systems International, and Network Computing Devices.

[17][8] As an InfoWorld article from 1990 stated, the ability to have OEM customers was a key factor in IXI Limited being successful.

[16] Part of this success was due to X.desktop coming with a customization toolkit that allowed system manufacturers to modify the appearance and functionality of the desktop environment to match their needs.

[12] The primary competitor of X.desktop was the Looking Glass product from the American company Visix Software, Inc.[8][14][18] Trade publications ran comparisons of the two desktop environments,[15][8] and detailed cases where one beat another for an account.

[9] By early 1993, the firm employed around 50 people, and in addition to its Cambridge headquarters, it also had offices in San Ramon, California, in the US and in Tokyo in Japan.

[20] As mentioned, SCO had previously licensed IXI technology in its operating system product, and there were existing ties between the engineering and marketing functions of both companies.

[28] (IXI had previously collaborated with Visionware, going back to 1988 when the Visionware technologies were first being developed within Systime Computers Ltd.[29]) Later in 1995 the merged business unit was subsumed more fully into its parent and became the Client Integration Division of SCO, which put out products from both former companies under the "Vision"-branded family name.

The X.desktop code gradually went into maintenance mode as X.desktop OEM providers migrated to CDE and many end-users abandoned Unix-based workstations altogether and switched to Wintel platforms.

Ray Anderson left SCO after several years there, and in 1999 founded Bango plc, a mobile commerce company based in Cambridge.