Gathering data about what's happening in your data center is well-defined. Gathering data about what's happening in a globally distributed development team, using different tools and writing to different platforms, has been more problematic. CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli, in speaking with me about today's announced acquisition of Danube Technologies (makers of the ScrumWorks Pro agile project management software), described how combining IT ops data with so-called "developer operations" data can save organizations big dollars. Often, IT operations teams get singular development stacks to deploy, which create what Portelli called "spiraling and recurring investments in one-off people, process and technology." While data center consolidation and virtualization can drive business value, real gains still can be made in "application rationalization," the move toward certified infrastructure stacks that will reduce the costs of application monitoring, hardware, servers and people. A company's best system architects and IT operations personnel create these certified stacks and make them available to development teams early in the design process. The stacks, Portelli explained, are backed up by the architects and IT personnel, with whom developers can collaborate with respect to design decisions, implementation and more. In essence, he said, once applications get to the deployment stage, it is understood they will work in the data center due to what he called the "correct by construction" development process. The end result is more streamlined development, higher-quality applications, more interoperability and dramatically reduced costs of operations and lifecycle support. Some organizations go so far as to hire people knowledgable in the certified stacks, which continues to drive this collaborative behavior.

For those of you in the Java world, my colleague Alex Handy has confirmed that there will be a JavaOne this year. Alex reports that it will be co-located this year with Oracle OpenWorld, which is scheduled for Sept. 19-23 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, home to JavaOne for many years now. Neither the OpenWorld Web site nor last year's JavaOne site make mention of this, and it will be interesting to see if the same members of the Java ecosystem support the event now that it appears Oracle will own Sun well before then.

Embedded systems modeling tools provider Artisan Software has merged with embedded Java and Ada tools provider Aonix to form Atego, which will focus on safety-critical systems and software, the company announced today. James B. Gambrell, the former CEO of Artisan, will become executive chairman of Atego, with responsibility for the new company's strategic direction and future acquisition opportunities. Pierre Cesarini, the former CEO of Aonix, will serve in that role at Atego and will be responsible for worldwide operations.

Artisan Studio remains the company's flaship software for modeling, with support for UML, SysML and architectural frameworks, while Artisan Workbench remains the company's development framework. Aonix brings in the PERC product line for application development in Java and Ada. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Microsoft's Soma Somasegar, senior vice president of the company's Developer Division, has posted an update to his blog regarding the timing for the release of Visual Studio 10. Read about it here.

A lot of talk around agile development these days is about scalability and distributed development, so large enterprises can benefit from the techniques. For organizations creating safety-critical software, such as the kind used in airplanes and traffic control systems, there are other issues to consider.

Jose Ruiz, a software engineer at AdaCore, is working with a team to develop a framework that will help the company’s customers adopt agile practices. Safety-critical software requires that certification standards be met, and that seemingly goes against one of agile development’s prime tenets: be able to adjust to change quickly.

“The certification process always is associated with a typical ‘V’ development model of requirements, modeling, coding and testing at the end,” Ruiz said. “Once all of the software and artifacts have gone through certification, it’s costly and hard to introduce any modification.”

Yet one agile technique (continuous integration) is being used to create something Ruiz called continuous certification. This requires builds, tests and requirements to be deeply integrated, so that any change in the system triggers verifications and notifies developers about artifacts that no longer are valid and need to be redone.

“In rigid development, you don’t pick this up until the end, when it’s most costly to fix,” Ruiz said. Using agile, he said, lets software evolve more easily and at a much lower cost.

The acquisition of the venerable software development tool maker is complete. For those who go back to Phillipe Kahn and Turbo Pascal, and have come to know the great developer products the company turned out, it must seem impossible that the company could not retain its position atop the market. For those who came on board during the Dale Fuller/Inprise era, the company's demise seems to be the logical conclusion to a period of mismanagement, ever-changing market strategies and lack of focus.

Despite all that, there was never a question about the quality of engineering. People who used Borland tools always raved about them. Now, as part of Micro Focus, the tools—now for application life-cycle management—will again get all the attention. While Borland's CodeGear developer legacy lives on at Embarcadero, its ALM solution has found a home at Micro Focus.

In an announcement today, Micro Focus said this acquisition, combined with the company's purchase of Compuware software quality products, will extend the Micro Focus offerings in the testing/quality market that is adjacent to its core in application management and modernization.

"The Borland and Compuware businesses are highly complementary, both to each other and to the Micro Focus...business," said Stephen Kelly, CEO of Micro Focus.

So long, Borland. It was a good, long run.

The merger of ALM software maker Borland and Micro Focus took a giant step toward completion today as Borland's shareholders overwhelming approved the US$113 million deal. Approximately 99% of the voting shares—65% of all oustanding shares—voted in favor of the merger proposal, according to a Borland spokesperson.

Micro Focus, best known for its mainframe application and data modernization software, made a final bid of $1.50 per share in an apparently successful move to close out an unnamed third party also interested in acquiring Borland. Two days ago, Borland settled a lawsuit brought by two shareholders who claimed Borland's board acted in an unfair manner in accepting the Micro Focus offer. The board claimed it settled the suit to avoid costly litigation or interference with the transaction, while stating the lawsuit was without merit.

Micro Focus shareholders are to vote on the deal on Friday.

In the wake of a mystery suitor's $1.25-per-share offer for Borland, Micro Focus has upped its offer for the company to $1.50 in an apparent attempt to blow the other suitor out of the water. While an offer of $1.35 would have satisfied Borland from a price standpoint, Micro Focus is clearly sending a signal that it wants to chase off this unnamed third party and get the deal done.

An anonymous financial analyst said that while the new offer sends a strong message, it doesn't really have much impact on the final price of the deal, noting that every 10-cent increase in share price translates to about $7.5 million. He said, "That doesn't seem like much when Micro Focus is guiding analysts to (approximately) $40 million of annual synergies in the long term."

Borland's shareholders are set to vote on the deal July 22, so we'll see if the mystery suitor increases its offer before then, or drops out of the chase.

A few weeks back, we reported that Micro Focus had tendered an offer to acquire ALM software maker Borland. Since then, another company has come forward to make a play, and one rumor has it that the suitor is Serena.

The company looking to top Micro Focus' bid is privately owned, according to SEC filings (remember Serena was taken private by SilverLake Partners back in 2005), and has the financial wherewithal to come in to play. There is quite a bit of overlap in the product lines—both offer SCM, requirements management and change management products—but Borland does have a few jewels Serena might covet. Among them are TeamDefine, an interactive simulation tool designed to be used during the requirements gathering process; Together, the venerable tool for modeling software architecture; and Silk, for quality assurance.

"Borland's value seems cheap," said a hedge fund manager who requested anonymity. "It's an opportunity for Serena to pick up assets on the cheap."

In an SEC filing, the unnamed company said it could reach an agreement with Borland in two weeks, and that was a week ago. So, the Borland saga could very well be resolved by then. Unless, of course, Micro Focus raises the stakes once again.

Microsoft has a funny relationship with open source. The company says it wants to be a good neighbor (or does it??), but then devours competing technologies and locks customers into its platform.

In what looks like a nod to the former, the company today has entered into an agreement with Black Duck Software to run the projects on Microsoft's hosted CodePlex site through the Black Duck KnowledgeBase repository. That repository lets users detect and manage the use of open-source code in application development projects. The deal also will let developers search the CodePlex site via Black Duck's Koders.com code search engine. So now, developers looking to reuse Windows and .NET code components from CodePlex can verify that the code does not violate any intellectual property rights or open-source license agreements before using them.