This may come as a surprise of those who have developed 10 to 15 years ago with Borland's Pascal, C, C++ or Delphi environments, long before Microsoft had any of its Visual environments... Borland has officially decided to get out of the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) business, and into the ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) and SDO (Software Delivery Optimization) business. This move is further explained in a letter from CEO Tod Nielsen
to Borland's customers and shareholders. Nielsen was appointed CEO last November when Borland's previous CEO stepped down after the disappointing decline of its development tools-related revenue. Nielsen spent 12 years at Microsoft, 2 years at BEA, but could only manage to work with Larry Ellison for less than 6 months.
Borland's major strategy shift also follows acquisitions of Legadero and particularly Segue Software, a market leader in software quality optimization.
The strategy shift comes at a time when there is indeed more interest in the way we deliver quality software rather than at the specific development tools we use. I guess this has also to do with the growing outsourcing of development, which increases the need for good requirements specifications, quality control (testing, bug tracking, ...), as well as configuration, change and risk management. This is further illustrated by the growing interest in ITIL, CMM and particularly CMMI.
Anyone interested in buying Borland's troubled development environments should contact Tod Nielsen...