Borland
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Borland Software Corporation is a software company headquartered in California. NASDAQ: [BORL]
History
The 1980s: Foundations
The Borland name started with a small company in Ireland.Intersimone 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. 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. Borland was therefore started as a private Californian company by Niels Jensen and Ole Henriksen in February 1982 and was eventually incorporated in August 1983 with Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn as the main stockholders. Kahn was employed as President and CEO.With the assistance of David Heller, by then a member of the Borland Board, the company was taken public on London's Unlisted Securities Market (USM) in 1986. A secondary stock offering on NASDAQ happened in 1988. The company's personnel then included Philippe Kahn as CEO, Chairman, and President, and Spencer Ozawa as Vice President Operations in the US, with Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad based in London. Later personnel included Marie Bourget as CFO and Gregor Freund as Director of European Operations.
Borland developed a series of well-regarded software development tools. Their 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. At about the same time Niels Jensen, and other members of his team who had been working on a Modula-2 compiler, left Borland to form Jensen and Partners, International (JPI). The finished compiler became TopSpeed Modula-2 which exists today as the underlying technology of the Clarion 4GL Programming Language.
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.
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".[[Citing sources 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.
Borland also offered the full source code to many of its products, including editors, spreadsheets, chess games, and database engines.
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. Some people thought that competition from Microsoft was to blame. Microsoft used the same tactics as they did with spreadsheets, word processors, browsers and other software components.
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 the Borland board of directors fired Kahn as CEO, President and Chairman of Borland, a position he had held for 12 years, in January 1995.Kellner, Krey, Jeffers, Parks Kahn remained on Borland board until November 7, 1996, when he resigned from that position.Borland press release 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.
The Delphi 1 rapid application development (RAD) environment was launched in 1995, under the leadership of Anders Hejlsberg.
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 a few years later.
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.
Borland reborn in name and fame
The Borland name (Borland Software Corporation) replaced Inprise in January 2001. The name Inprise was abandoned.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 resigned in July 2005 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).
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.
Products
Current products
Borland's current product line includes:- C++ Builder
- CaliberRM
- Delphi
- JBuilder
- Optimizeit Suite
- InterBase
- JDataStore
- Borland Enterprise Studio, for C++, Mobile and Java
- Borland Enterprise Server
- StarTeam
- Together
Old software, no longer actively sold
- Programming tools
- CodeWright
- C#Builder (Now part of Delphi)
- Kylix
- Turbo Pascal
- Turbo Assembler
- Turbo Debugger
- Turbo Profiler
- Turbo C
- Turbo BASIC
- Turbo Prolog (now Visual Prolog)
- Turbo C++
- Borland C++
- Object Vision
- Turbo Modula-2
Notes
References
External links
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