In the past year Borland has often blamed its IDE division to be the cause of this problems, slowing its ambition to be an ALM leader with huge financial losses. In May, Borland finally managed to sell the CodeGear unit to Embarcadero. The financial results of CodeGear are now difficult to estimate, as Embarcadero is a private company. What is left at Borland is a mixed set of products, resulting of some in-house innovation and external acquisitions (Togethersoft, Segue), grouped under the “Application Lifecycle Management” banner. None of the components of this set is considered as a top leader in its specific market and good integration between existing products is always difficult to realize. Trying to sell these type products is more difficult, because you have to reach a higher level in the enterprise than for individual developer products. It is also the type of project that most companies will postpone in a period of difficult economic conditions. Furthermore, this put Borland in competition with bigger fishes, like IBM that purchased rival Telelogic last year, and companies like MKS that have their roots in the ALM market.
It would be a bad thing if Borland fails just after having celebrated its 25th birthday, but if it was already struggling in times where the economy was good, we could fear that survival would be even more difficult in the hard times that are ahead of us. Researching for this post, I found that Borland had already cut 40% of its workforce in 1995 after the resignation of its founder Philippe Kahn, so maybe we should believe that it could be just “another deep crisis” in Borland history, a company briefly knew under the name of Inprise ;o)
