Borland has continued its metamorphosis into an "end-to-end code management" company with the acquisition on Wednesday of Segue Software for around $100 million (£57 million), and an announcement that it's selling off its IDE business. Segue produces Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) software, consisting of requirements management and testing tools.
Borland has been drifting away from its origins as a development tool vendor for the past few years as it has moved into the growing market for ALM systems. This announcement marks the completion of the process, leaving the company that created many of the household names in development with no programming tools. Borland's previous products such as Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ were very successful tools, but the company also produced other productivity applications such as SideKick.
More recently, tools like Delphi and JBuilder have struggled against competitors like Visual Studio and Eclipse. The company says that it is unable to give its tools the attention they require while pursuing its new strategy. Indeed, some shareholders in the company were calling for its breakup in July of last year.
"We're seeing a big shift in the market from individual developer productivity to enterprise productivity, and software as a managed business process is the focus of Borland", Chris Barbin, senior vice president Worldwide Services of Borland, told Builder UK. He also said that maintaining two diverging product lines was difficult. "It's tough for us to focus on both areas successfully. We can be marginally successful at both, but not widely successful in either one."
Borland also admitted that commoditisation of developer tools and the availability of open source IDEs like Eclipse had "eroded" the market for such products. "Those particular tools in the IDE space have seen a tremendous rise in the past couple of years, and we're riding that wave in terms of how we're building on Eclipse." He reassured Eclipse users that the company wasn't abandoning the framework. "Not at all. We continue to be Eclipse committers, we're very focussed on working with the Eclipse community. We're building our software delivery platform on Eclipse."
The acquisition of Segue is just the latest in a series that Borland has used to strengthen its ALM product range. Last October it bought Legadero for its governance software. It also acquired TeraQuest Metrics earlier last year.
Barbin said that despite the numerous acquisitions, there were still parts of the lifecycle that Borland's products didn't cover. "We've never had a direct presence in the testing area, the quality area. We've been a partner and a customer of Segue's for over two years now. We have integration into our products already. They're a well run business" he said. After the merger completes, the Segue name will disappear, although brands such as SilkCentral and SilkTest are likely to be retained and the products integrated into Borland's existing product set.
Many vendors are entering the ALM market, but Borland believes that its advantage is that it isn't trying to sell hardware or other software, such as operating systems or database servers, alongside its offerings. "Some customers want the full solution from an independent vendor that doesn't have another agenda" commented Barbin.
The Segue acquisition is expected to be completed in the second quarter of this year. A buyer has yet to be found for the IDE business.
