Borland

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Borland Software Corporation

Type of co.	Public (NASDAQ: BORL)
Founded	California (1983)
Headquarters	Cupertino, California
Key people	Tod Nielsen - CEO Philippe Kahn, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, Niels Jensen - Founders
Industry	Computer software
Products	C++ Builder, CaliberRM, Delphi, JBuilder, Kylix, Optimizeit, StarTeam, Together, VisiBroker
Revenue	$309.5 million USD (2004)
Employees	1300 est. (2005)
Slogan	Excellence Endures
Website	www.borland.com

Borland Software Corporation is a software company headquartered in California. NASDAQ: BORL It was founded in 1983 by Philippe Kahn the inventor of the camera phone . Others involved may have included Niels Jensen, Ole Rasmussen and Mogens Glad. It is best known for its software development tools, especially the Turbo Pascal programming tool that has evolved into today's Delphi. The company also produces Application Lifecycle Management tools and sells consulting and education services.

1 History
2 Products
- 2.1 Current products
- 2.2 Old software, no longer actively sold
3 Notes
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

[edit] The 1980s: Foundations

Three Danish citizens, Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad founded Borland Ltd. in August 1981 to develop products for the CP/M operating system using the name of an off-the-shelf company. However response to the company's products at the CP/M-82 show in San Francisco showed that a U.S. company would be needed to reach the American market. They met Philippe Kahn, a young French mathematician, who had just moved to Silicon Valley and had been a key developer of the Micral. The prospectus for the first Borland IPO describes in detail the predecessor companies and their arms-length relationship with Borland. The three Danes had embarked, at first relatively successfully, on marketing software from Ireland (a tax haven) before running into some challenges at the time when they met Philippe Kahn. The partnership seems to have benefited all involved. Philippe Kahn was at all times Chairman, President and CEO of Borland from its inception in 1983 until he left in 1995.

Borland successfuly launched a series of blockbusters that included Sidekick, Turbo Pascal, SuperKey, Lightning etc... According to the London IPO filings, the management team was Philippe Kahn as President, Marie Bourget as CFO, Spencer Leyton as VP of business development. Board members were Philippe Kahn, John Nash and David Heller. With the assistance of John Nash and David Heller both British members of the Borland Board, the company was taken public on London's Unlisted Securities Market (USM) in 1986. Shroders was the lead investment banker.

A first US IPO followed in 1989 after Ben Rosen joined the Borland board with Goldman as the lead banker and a second offering in 1991 with Lazard as the lead banker. All offerings were very successful and over-subscribed.

Borland developed a series of well-regarded software development tools. Its first product was Turbo Pascal, using the compiler developed by Anders Hejlsberg. 1984 saw the launch of SideKick, a time organization, notebook and calculator utility, notable for being a Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program.

In 1987 Borland purchased Wizard Systems and incorporated portions of the Wizard C technology into Turbo C. Bob Jarvis, the author of Wizard C became a Borland employee. Turbo C was released on 18 May 1987 and an estimated 100,000 copies were shipped in the first month of its release. This apparently drove a wedge between Borland and Niels Jensen and the other members of his team who had been working on compilers. An agreement was reached and they spun-off a company called TopSpeed. They launched a compiler that became TopSpeed Modula-2 which exists today as the underlying technology of the Clarion 4GL Programming Language, a Windows development tool.

In September 1987 Borland purchased Ansa-Software, including their Paradox (version 2.0) database management tool. Richard Schwartz, CEO of Ansa, became Borland's CTO and Ben Rosen joined the Borland board.

The Quattro Pro spreadsheet was launched in 1989 with, at the time, a notable improvement and charting capabilities. Lotus Development, under the leadership of Jim Manzi sued Borland for copyright infringement. The litigation brought forward Borland's open standards position as opposed to Lotus' closed approach. Borland, under Philippe Kahn's leadership took a position of principle and announced that they would defend against Lotus' legal position and "fight for programmer's rights".^{[citation needed]} After 6 years of litigation the United States Supreme Court validated Borland's position and Lotus lost the case.

Additionally, Borland was known for its practical and creative approach towards software piracy and intellectual property (IP), introducing its "Borland no-nonsense license agreement." This allowed the developer/user to utilize its products "just like a book"; he or she was allowed to make multiple copies of a program, as long as only one copy was in use at any point in time.

[edit] The 1990s: Rise and change

In September 1991 Borland purchased Ashton-Tate, bringing the dBase and InterBase databases to the house, in an all stock transaction. Competition with Microsoft was fierce. Microsoft used its dominance in operating systems to shake Borland up. Microsoft launched the competing database Microsoft Access and bought the dBase clone FoxPro in 1992, undercutting Borland's prices. Microsoft was focused on Borland and it must be noted that today Borland is the only company still standing among Microsoft's competitors at that time: Software Publishing, WordPerfect, Lotus and many others are all gone.

During the early 1990s Borland's implementation of C++ was considered superior to then-market-trailing Microsoft. Also, its development of Paradox, with its ObjectPAL programming language, pitted it against software by Microsoft, in particular Access.

By the mid-1990s, Borland fell from dominance in the software tools market, with the balance shifting in favor of competitor Microsoft.

A change in market conditions contributed to Borland's fall from prominence. In the 1980's, companies had few people who understood the growing personal computer phenomenon, and so most technical people were given free rein to purchase whatever software they thought they needed. Borland had done an excellent job marketing to those with a highly technical bent. By the mid-1990's, however, companies were beginning to ask what the return was on the investment they had made in this loosely controlled PC software buying spree. Company executives were starting to ask questions that were hard for technical folks to answer, and so corporate standards began to be created. This required new kinds of marketing and support materials from software vendors, but Borland remained focused on quality and software craftsmanship, which unfortunately seemed to matter less in a changed market. Rival software company Microsoft did a much better job of recognizing the changing market and shipping "adequate" solution that corporations were seeking and edging out Borland using their dominance with operating systems.

In October 1994, Borland sold Quattro Pro to Novell for $140 Million in cash, repositioning the company on its core software development tools.

Philippe Kahn and the Borland board came to a disagreement on how to focus the company, and Philippe Kahn resigned as Chairman, CEO and President and Chairman of Borland, a position he had held for 12 years, in January 1995. However, the parting was amicable as Kahn remained on the Borland board until November 7, 1996, when he resigned from that position.^[1] Borland named Gary Wetsel as CEO, but he resigned in July 1996. William F. Miller was interim CEO until September of that year, when Whitney G. Lynn became interim president and CEO and then continued to have a succession of CEOs including Dale Fuller and Tod Nielsen presently.

Philippe Kahn co-founded Starfish Software in 1994 and pioneered wireless synchronization. The company is now owned by Nokia.

The Delphi 1 rapid application development (RAD) environment was launched in 1995, under the leadership of Anders Hejlsberg.

[edit] The Inprise years, and name changes

On November 25, 1996, Del Yocam was hired as Borland CEO and Chairman.

In 1997, Borland sold Paradox to Corel. In November 1997, Borland acquired Visigenic, a middleware company that was focused on implementations of CORBA.

On April 29, 1998, Borland refocused its efforts on targeting enterprise applications development, and went through a name change to Inprise Corporation (the name came from the slogan Integrating the Enterprise). The idea was to integrate Borland's tools, Delphi, C++ Builder, and JBuilder with enterprise environment software, including Visigenic's implementations of CORBA, Visibroker for C++ and Java, and the new emerging product, Application Server.

For a number of years (both before and during the Inprise name) Borland suffered from serious financial losses and very poor public image. When the name was changed to Inprise, many thought Borland had gone out of business.

dBase was sold in 1999.

In 1999, in the middle of Borland's identity crisis, Dale L. Fuller replaced CEO Del Yocam. At this time Fuller's title was "interim president and CEO." The "interim" was dropped in December 2000.

A proposed merger between Inprise and Corel was announced in February 2000, aimed at producing Linux based products, however the scheme was abandoned when Corel's shares fell and it became clear that there was really no strategic fit.

InterBase 6.0 was made available as an open source product in July 2000.

[edit] Borland reborn in name and fame

In a flip-flop of marketing blunders, the Borland name was replaced by the Inprise name, just to be changed back in January 2001. The name Inprise was abandoned. Borland's brand equity recognized. This was a very costly exercise.

Under the Borland name and a new management team headed by President and CEO Dale L. Fuller, a now-smaller and profitable Borland refocused on Delphi, and created a version of Delphi and C++ Builder for Linux, both under the name Kylix. This brought Borland's expertise in Integrated Development Environments to the Linux platform for the first time. Kylix was launched in 2001.

Plans to spin off the InterBase division as a separate company were abandoned after Borland and the people who were to run the new company could not agree on terms for the separation. With the reenergized division under new management, Borland stopped open source releases of InterBase and has developed and sold new versions at a fast pace.

Borland made a commitment to the technology of web services releasing Delphi 6 as the first Integrated Development Environment to support web services. Now all of their current development platforms support web services.

C#Builder was released in 2003 as a native C# development tool, competing head-on with Visual Studio .NET. As of the 2005 release, C#Builder, Delphi for Win32, and Delphi for .NET have been combined into a single IDE called "Borland Developer Studio" (though the combined IDE is still popularly known as "Delphi"). Supporting web services and now .NET is doing a lot to bolster Borland's image in the industry. With their consistent profitability, in late 2002 Borland purchased design tool vendor TogetherSoft and tool publisher Starbase, makers of the StarTeam configuration management tool and the CaliberRM requirements management tool. The latest releases of JBuilder and Delphi integrate these tools to give developers a broader set of tools for development.

The rounded-out set of product offerings legitimized Borland's new claim to the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) market, with tools spanning the software development chain from requirements, through design and development, to testing and deployment. In 2004 Borland rolled out its Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) marketing tagline, pitching the idea that SDO encompassed ALM in addition to higher-level software manufacturing concepts like portfolio management and estimation tools.

Former CEO Dale Fuller was abruptly fired in July 2005 after a series of financial and commercial blunders, but remained on the board of directors. Former COO Scott Arnold took the title of interim president and chief executive officer until November 8, 2005, when it was announced that Tod Nielsen would take over as CEO effective November 9, 2005.

In October 2005, Borland acquired Legadero, in order to add its IT Management and Governance (ITM&G) suite, called Tempo, to the Borland product line.

On February 8, 2006 Borland announced the divestiture of their IDE division, including Delphi, JBuilder, and InterBase. At the same time they announced the planned acquisition of Segue Software, a maker of software test and quality tools, in order to concentrate on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). The new spin off will be called CodeGear.

On March 20, 2006 Borland said that it had acquired Gauntlet Systems, a provider of technology that screens software under development for quality and security.

On November 14, 2006 Borland announced its decision to separate the Developer Tools Group into a wholly-owned subsidiary focused on maximizing developer productivity. The newly formed operation, CodeGear, will be responsible for advancing the four primary product lines formerly associated with Borland’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) business.