Borland recently took another zig-zag in its short but turbulent history, effectively announcing that it was exiting developer tools and focusing on application lifecycle management with the acquisition of Segue Software. The move is another example of how open-source and free software is revolutionising the economics of business IT.
First, a little history: this latest move was Borland tearing out its roots. The firm started out as a hacker outfit with products such as Turbo Pascal and subsequently added C, C++, Java and the Delphi developer toolkit. The tools were the sole constant theme standing proud of the sometimes chaotic changes at the company.
Borland had an early hit with Sidekick, its fondly remembered organiser software that was a staple of DOS desktops, and it made a splash in databases and spreadsheets by undercutting Ashton-Tate's dBase and Lotus 1-2-3 on price. Then Borland made its move for scale by acquiring Ashton-Tate in one of the biggest mergers of the PC era up to that point.
The deal was a bad move for all except Tate's shareholders and boosted a trend for equally disastrous "my one's bigger than yours" combination strategies.
By this point in the early 1990s, Borland was in its pomp and chief executive Philippe Kahn at his most colourful. The Frenchman even sent customers CDs of his dubious noodling on the saxophone, but pride came before a fall.
Borland and Novell attempted an anti-Microsoft axis that was quickly toppled, and Borland even sued a former executive, alleging he gave away trade secrets when moving to Symantec.
Eventually, Kahn walked, but Borland remained a soap opera. Delphi became a big hit, the firm changed its name to Inprise then back again, and went in and out of a merger deal with Corel.
Most recently, Borland has adopted an enterprise-centric strategy of so-called software delivery optimisation – in other words, making development pr ojects work the way they should.
That policy sits ill at ease with the core development tools that are under threat from open-source projects such as Eclipse. And Borland has taken the bold decision to jettison its integrated development environment (IDE) lines. Although some watchers question the value of such a franchise, don't bet against Microsoft or IBM purchasing this part of the business – Borland is still revered for its engineering talent.
As Borland attempts yet another guise, the lessons of the changing economics of enterprise soft- ware are also apparent elsewhere.
Oracle is reportedly in talks to acquire several open-source software firms, having already collected database firms Innobase and Sleepycat. This could be seen as (a) Oracle attempting to understand a model that threatens its sovereignty (b) paying off annoying new entrants, or (c) to take Larry Ellison at his word, an "all you can eat" move to please a broad constituency.
Borland selling off its developer tools, Oracle buying up the open-source community – who woulda thunk it, as the baseball legend Yogi Berra put it. But then enterprise software is becoming a whole new ball game and these are unlikely to be the last examples of radical makeovers in the industry.
