Yet Microsoft is clearly interested in the ALM market as well. Can you keep it symbiotic without getting pushed to the side in any particular area?
The evidence so far is that we have delivered. [We demonstrated] "together modelling" on Visual Studio, and a version of Caliber requirements gathering product on [Microsoft's forthcoming collaborative development suite] Team System. In both cases, Microsoft has welcomed us with open arms. With our Delphi installed base, we have a huge chunk of Win32 developers we're helping to move ahead on .NET. There are a lot of reasons for Microsoft to see us an ally, and I think it would be our intent to keep it that way.
Can you address the calls from shareholder Robert Coates to break up the company, which he says will improve shareholder value?
I'd love to see the details of whatever plan he has. As you'd expect, we've looked at a lot of things as part of normal strategic process. And we've concluded there are important synergies between the relationships between our developer [products] and our ALM suite. And we have unique capability that makes the ALM stronger and better.
On the specific part of our deployment, or middleware, products — as we think about what gets in the way of building and deploying software — a chunk of the gap is between the application team who doesn't know what kind of environment they're deploying into it. [The] handoff isn't working very well. Part of the reason we think it makes sense to have those products [is because] with the benefit of the run-time experience, we know a little bit of what it takes to take applications from development to operations.
We have some products we have developed, and [we] continue to look at developing [more] that address the apps-to-ops gap. It's not a huge focus, but it's not obvious why it's so compelling to "break this up".
I think it's very easy to...
