Is Borland Relevant Anymore?
March 1, 2005 —
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At the beginning of this year, Borland announced its annual earnings. While it managed to stay in the black for the second year in a row, the posted numbers reveal a grim dimension: Borland’s revenue from product licenses declined year over year. Given that this past year has been universally hailed as a rebound for technology, this decline is not good news. However, when you compare results of the three large pure-play vendors of programming tools (Borland, Compuware, and Mercury Interactive), the emerging picture is grimmer yet. Compuware’s license revenues grew 12 percent in the nine months ending the same quarter as Borland’s report, while Mercury Interactive’s grew 27 percent. So, what is the matter with Borland, then, that it was down 2 percent?
As far as I can tell, two things: lack of product innovation and poor execution. Before the current problems, some terrible executive decisions severely hurt the company: the acquisition of VisiBroker, the name change to Inprise, the near acquisition by Corel. These events cast the company in an uncertain light.
Coming after the disastrous acquisitions of Ashton-Tate and Paradox, the constant changes in the company’s direction made developers and their managers gun-shy about committing to strategies that looked fickle and indecisive. Over the course of the past few years, Borland has certainly changed that perception. Everyone now knows it sells an enterprise-oriented toolchain that is particularly strong in Java. It also has a few oddball products like Delphi that, while not moribund, are unlikely to see much adoption.
Almost as if to overcome the lack of direction of preceding administrations, the current executive team has been stuck in a prolonged product stasis that is starting to hurt sales. Borland acquired several well-respected technologies, such as Together, Caliber RM, OptimizeIt and StarTeam, stuck them to the Builder IDE, and sold the lot as a lightly integrated toolchain. This worked because the acquired products were solid and had loyal customers.
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