Novell continued to develop Ximian's original products, while adding support for its own GroupWise and ZENworks software.

The company was founded on 19 October 1999 as International GNOME Support, but its name was changed to Helix Code later.

[5] The company's business model was based on providing a mix of free and proprietary software, solutions and services.

[14][15][16] Ximian both developed new products and "polished" existing free software projects to provide more consistent operation.

These projects were packaged into its Ximian Desktop product — a range of integrated applications intended to provide all the tools a typical business user might require.