Feb 8th 2006

Borland Breakup :: whither now, Delphi?

Borland, a company whose reputation was built upon its programming tools, today announced that it would be ‘divesting’ itself of its IDE products. This means that the entire Borland Developer Studio – including Delphi, C++Buiilder and C#Builder, plus the JBuilder products for Java have now been cast adrift. At the same time, Borland has bought up another company, Segue Software. Here is the official version of events…

CUPERTINO, Calif., - Feb 8, 2006 - Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ NM: BORL), today announced aggressive plans to drive its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) business forward.  As part of that plan, Borland has agreed to buy Segue Software Inc. (NASDAQ CM: SEGU), the Massachusetts-based provider of global software quality and testing solutions.  In addition, Borland announced plans to seek a buyer for the portion of its business associated with the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), including the award-winning Borland Developer Studio (Delphi®, C++Builder® and C#Builder®) and JBuilder® product lines.

Both actions are significant milestones in Borland’s strategy to secure leadership in the growing ALM sector and expand its ability to offer organizations solutions that make software delivery a more predictable and manageable business process.

“Segue’s quality optimization products and services will add significantly to our growing portfolio of application lifecycle management solutions,” said Tod Nielsen, Borland president and chief executive officer.  “This is a natural extension of our focus to expand beyond development and into software delivery, helping companies increase business value through successful software initiatives.”

To be honest, this news is not entirely unexpected. For a long time, the cracks between the development side of Borland and the corporate side (the people who specialise in ‘Software Delivery Optimization’, ‘Application Lifecycle Management ’ and similarly arcane and inscrutable buzzwords) have been all too visible. Indeed, in our view, Borland has, in recent times, both undervalued and misunderstood its development team (we have, here at Bitwise, been critical of the inept marketing of The Borland Developer Studio).

The cracks seemed to grow even wider when, in December 2005, the chief scientist of Borland’s developer tools, Danny Thorpe, was recruited by Google. In spite of this, Borland retained a strong developer team ranging from chief scientist, Alan Bauer, to the well-known ‘public face’ of Borland, Chief Evangelist, David Intersimone.

At the time of writing  it is not know which company will end up owning the programming products (though some interesting rumours are already flying around!). However, the developer team has said that the ‘roadmap’ of future developments of the existing products remains a commitment. For more on this, see this announcement from David Intersimone.