For more than a year, Canopy Venture Partners, a key early-stage venture capital player in Utah, has stayed on the sidelines.

The fate of the high-profile Lindon company and its portfolio companies was in question after a power struggle erupted in late 2004 within its leadership -- leading to the ouster of Ralph Yarro, its former longtime CEO. Further complicating the shakeup were the suicides of former director of information systems and technology Robert L. Penrose and Val Noorda Kreidel, Ray Noorda's only daughter and a board member of the Canopy Group.

But the company appears poised to resume its role as a critical funding source in Utah with the hiring earlier this week of two new executives to spearhead the investment strategy and management of Canopy's stable of 13 leading information technology companies.

Ron Heinz, who is chairman of Helius Inc., a Canopy portfolio company, was named executive manager by the Canopy board, which comprises mainly of the Noorda family. Heinz, who has more than 25 years of management and operating experience, had spent 12 years at Novell, serving as a corporate officer and senior vice president.

Brandon Tidwell was appointed Canopy's general counsel and director of finance. Tidwell, an associate with the Silicon Valley office of Latham & Watkins, and more recently the Salt Lake City law firm of Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, has counseled many venture capital financings, mergers and acquisitions, and public offerings in his career.

Heinz replaces Bill Mustard, who took over as CEO of Canopy after Yarro was ousted. Little has been known until now about Canopy because its management under Mustard didn't respond to media queries about the shakeup and the company's future plans.

But Heinz says Canopy, under his management, intends to be "more open with the media" as part of its move to become more visible in the community.

"Our No. 1 objective is to continue investing in our existing portfolio, and evaluate future investments in other information technology companies, with a bias toward Utah County," he said. "For now we can't comment on the amount of investment to be made, but we do have access to a significant amount of capital."

He also declined to estimate the asset value of Canopy's holdings.

"We're also looking to be more active in trade groups such as the Utah Technology Council, and to co-invest with other venture capital companies such as vSpring," Heinz said.

The existing Canopy portfolio includes nine Utah County companies including MyFamily.com of Provo and eight others in Lindon. They are Helius, Center 7 Inc., Directpointe Inc., iArchives Inc., Maxstream Inc., Pointecast Corp., Power Innovations International Inc., and Communitect Inc.

Other Canopy companies include Cogito Inc. of Draper, Luxul Corp. of Salt Lake City, Smart Bomb Interactive Inc. of Salt Lake City and ViaWest of Denver.

Other companies with former Canopy ties include Lindon-based Altiris Inc., a computer network management services provider. The other two companies are KeyLabs, a hardware and software laboratory acquired by AppLabs Technologies; and MTI Technology, a data storage, storage management and data protection solutions provider.

Some industry analysts see these executive management changes as a sign of Canopy's return to its key role as an early-stage funding source for startup companies.

"Canopy has been out of the early seed funding market for too long. It played a very important role for a number of years from the mid-90s onwards," said Richard Nelson, president and chief executive of Utah Technology Council.

More than $60 million in venture capital was raised in the state during the first quarter and $103 million was raised in 2005, according to the MoneyTree Report, released today by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

"It's good news for Utah County and the state to have this important funding link back to tie higher risk see venture capital for entrepreneurs with angel and venture funding," Nelson said.

Laura DiDio, senior analyst with The Yankee Group in Boston, agreed. "Both Heinz and Tidwell are hometown boys. Heinz had worked at Novell before, and is therefore familiar with the operations of the Canopy companies."

"But they're going to have to move quickly and decisively to review the portfolio companies' operations, take a look at where the biggest returns on investment are coming from, before they can aggressively do venture capital investments," she said.