Borland: Interest, but no buyer for tools line

Marketing VP discusses Borland's future in the ALM market

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 03/06/06

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March 6, 2006— Deciding to concentrate on ALM (application lifecycle management), Borland Software last month announced plans to sell off its faltering JBuilder Java IDE business, as well as its Windows tools platform, including Delphi. With its SDO (Software Delivery Optimization) for ALM, Borland is squaring off against formidable opponents in IBM and Microsoft. With nearly a month having passed since Borland's announcement, InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill spoke to Borland's Erik Frieberg, vice president of product marketing and strategy, about the company's intentions, and to get a progress report on the planned sale of Borland's developer tool lines.

IW: Why is Borland exiting not only the Java IDE business, but the Windows tools business also?

Frieberg: What we're doing is, basically, Borland is committed to developers. And what we're focusing on is, "How can we add value to the developer?" And what we've seen is that specific to the JBuilder IDE and the Delphi programming environments that [exist] today, those are two among many types of IDEs, tools, and environments developers work in. So, Borland's always been about choice and been a bit agnostic about language and platform. We're in essence, I'll say, exiting our JBuilder business as the Java IDE business, but then we're still committed and focused on the developer, very much focused on .Net development, Java development, C++ development, any type of development and packaged app customization and integration. We're moving out of IDE to more of an ALM focus. IDEs are just literally a point product area. They're one of the things that developers use. And what we've seen is the bigger impact that developers can have for the organization is more around the lifecycle. The lifecycle has a lot more impact on success or failure and also impacts the development projects [more] than the IDE does.

IW: How much impact did Eclipse and the commoditization of the Java IDE market have on your decision to sell off JBuilder?

Frieberg: It was one of the factors, along with the fact that we actually want to support multiple tooling environments, not just one in particular. So we will. And while we are getting out of the Delphi business as an IDE, [Microsoft's] Visual Studio is a significant portion of our strategy going forward. And supporting .Net developments is something that we're doing today. And, if you look—from an ALM perspective—we are adding to Visual Studio Team System requirements management, modeling, quality and testing, and other aspects to that lifecycle, versus just an IDE that focuses on personal productivity.

IW: What were some of the other factors in your decision?

Frieberg: It was that we didn't want to focus on one IDE, as [in] JBuilder versus Eclipse. And also, there's more than just IDEs. If you're doing PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) development—Ruby on Rails, XML—there's all types of tooling and things developers use to create applications today. So, it was a choice of moving out of a point-specific IDE into an environment like Eclipse that supports a broad set of tooling. So, it's really around focus. Instead of focusing on a specific IDE, we can focus on the lifecycle. And Eclipse, while having an impact through commoditization, on the reverse side provided an opportunity because Eclipse is not just an IDE, it's an integration framework, and it provides us a great integration framework to bring all of our ALM capabilities to bear through multiple roles within the software development process.

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