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Goodbye Borland IDE business; it is all ALM!
Posted On May 25, 2007 by Raja Kishore Reddy filed under
Back in the early nineties, Borland was considered as a company that could challenge Microsoft and was the worldwide leader in developer tools. During those days, the developer tools business was big because rest of the market place was small. Computers were still a commodity that was not quite affordable by everyone and it was far from the ubiquitous status that it enjoys in offices and homes today.
As a company, Borland, during the early nineties, tried to become a Microsoft. It tried everything expect perhaps an operating system. They built office applications, developed databases, business software and tried reinventing the company. However, because of Microsoft’s strength as an OS vendor, the company failed to reach anywhere.
The company’s mercurial founder Phillipe Kahn left the company midway to set up other ventures, including Lightsurf and the not so successful StarFish Software, which was later acquired by Motorola.
In 1995, the company reinvented Pascal, which was being reduced to a language that was only used by the academia, and built the industry’s first RAD tool, Delphi. Delphi was a front-runner in many ways and was ahead of Microsoft’s IDEs. But by that time Microsoft had moved the Windows world to Visual Basic and Visual C++. Delphi continued to be the second-most preferred development platform after Windows for quite some time. Even today, Borland is the second largest IDE vendor in the world after Microsoft.
Throughout the history of the company, which is 22 yeas and a few months as of today, the company was pretty dedicated to developers. Always innovating, whether the innovations really made an impact or not. It has created products and technologies for developers, which were always ahead of the competition.
However, on the marketing and positioning front the company often failed to make an impact. In a move that many analysts describe as a colossal blunder, the company changed its name to Inprise in the mid-nineties and tried its hand at some middleware technologies.
Better wisdom prevailed much later and Inprise changed its name back to Borland in the late nineties and positioned itself as a tools vendor once again.
Following a series of successful quarters in the first half of this decade, Borland managed to reinvent successfully as an end-to-end software application development cycle company. It acquired a number of companies in the past few years, which include the following companies:
- VM Gear provides tools for maximizing performance in managed code environments such as the Java and .Net platforms. Borland already had Optimizeit for Java and a .Net tool is understood to be under development. VM Gear added another layer to its solutions;
- BoldSoft’s Bold is a toolset that automatically carries the modeling of an application through to the actual coding of the application. Bold is supposed to have been integrated with the latest Delphi release;
- Starbase, which provides team development tools and solutions; and
- TogetherSoft, which has ControlCenter, a software development collaboration and modeling tool, enables software developers to coordinate development efforts.
The company soon branded itself as an ALM (Application Life cycle Management) company and was seen challenging Mercury and Rational (now with IBM).
Yet, the bread and butter of the company were coming from the traditional developer IDE businesses. While every year the company was religiously updating its C++, Java and .Net suites, the growing developer base was being wooed away by Open Source vendors.
Though both Eclipse and NetBeans started off as a fledgling piece of software, with a number of Open Source developers contributing, using and testing these software, they have become one of the more stable platforms around.
Again, Java community survives on cheaper options from a notepad to other freeware IDEs. With the momentum clearly leaning towards the free and Open Source community, surviving as an IDE vendor in the Java space was expected to be difficult.
Delphi, which is the best tool from Borland, has recorded an average growth over the past many years. The fact that you need to master a language that is no more followed in a majority of educational institutions (Pascal is being replaced by C/C++) means lesser developers will actually pick up this tool in the coming days.
These days, only two types of developers are using C++. The first lot includes Unix and Linux professionals. The other comprises system and embedded developer groups. While the latter still has an affinity to buying professional tools, free and Open Source tools are preferred by most *NIX folks.
What remain are the tools that are positioned for Microsoft platform. While Borland continues to be the biggest Microsoft partner in this space, Microsoft itself competes with Borland with its Visual Studio tools. The way Microsoft is pushing its developer tools strategy and the launch of VS.net 2005 come as no great news to any MS development tool partner, unless you are actually building a tool that complements VS.net.
Borland has scored there, since some of the ALM tools actually are bundled along with VS.net 2003 by resellers. However, a C++ Studio or C# Studio competes with MS tools. Borland has spent a lot of money, effort and time (which might be a few man millenniums) in developing these tools. The company has enamored many developers with the developer friendliness of their tools. But the management is clear on its decision to find a buyer for these tools. The company has announced its plans to buy Segue Software for a whopping USD100 million. Segue incidentally makes software for quality and optimization, and is said to have nearly 2,000 enterprise customers.
I must confess that when I read the letter from the Borland CEO on the company website, a moment of sadness crept over me. Mind you, I have never been a shareholder of the company or have been associated with the company in anyway. However, here was a company that thrived on selling solutions to software developers and now they are forced to sell that business to survive in the market place.
However, at this point of time, this is the best decision the company can take!
The rapid competition from vendors who are offering more or all of it free, and the fact that it works for a community to continue investing into such a model makes sense for everyone. How do you compete with something that is free? It is a question that has very few answers.
Borland management has taken a decision to sell the IDE business, which is worth in actual efforts much more than the hundred million US dollars the company hopes to get.
The million-dollar question is who will buy the business from Borland? At least, as I write these (third week of February) words, the names mentioned include everyone from Microsoft to BEA to Mercury to even IBM.
There can also be a third-party vendor not exactly selling software that may come in out of the blue and set up a fresh business initiative.
Since software is becoming more and more complex, I guess tools and services for managing software development cycles are going to be much more complex too. And there is certainly big money out there.
However, I will still miss those strong IDEs, which were branded Borland!
S Ramdas is the founder editor of the magazine and continues to be the Executive Publisher. He can be reached on ramdas@developeriq.com. This article was published in March 2006 edition of DeveloperIQ Software Magazine.