Borland Tools: No Sale
Will spin-off of IDEs into CodeGear subsidiary have legs?
By Jennifer deJong
December 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Nine months after it put its IDE business up for sale, Borland has done an about-face.
In its third-quarter earnings call last month, the company announced that it will retain ownership of its developer tools group, reversing its earlier decision to seek a buyer. The developer tools group, which includes the company’s Java, C++, C# and Delphi IDEs, will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Borland Software, under the name CodeGear.
“After much consideration, we made the decision to establish CodeGear as a separate subsidiary,” Borland president and CEO Tod Nielsen said in a statement. “We have always stated our intention to find the right buyer for this business….After a lengthy due diligence process with several serious bidders, we feel the CodeGear decision is in the best interests of our customers, shareholders and employees,” the statement said.
Asked why Borland reversed course, the company’s chief marketing officer, Rick Jackson, said in a phone interview with SD Times: “Valuation and price had something to do with it. This was not a fire sale.” According to Jackson, Borland had lined up five potential buyers, including “several private equity firms and a couple of strategic companies.” He declined to offer details about the interested parties but said it was difficult to establish an appropriate value for the tools business. “The financials of Borland’s ALM business were so intertwined with those of [the developer tools group] that operational expenses were hard to break out.”
Voke analyst Theresa Lanowitz said it’s difficult to know exactly what went down with potential buyers. “There may have been source code issues, revenue issues, intellectual property issues,” she said. “But the whole reporting of events would have been a lot cleaner if they had not announced [the plan to sell] in February, and then dragged out [the process] until November.”
Lanowitz, who worked for Borland earlier in her career, isn’t convinced the decision to spin off the IDE business will work. “The IDE business today is commoditized,” she said. “It comes down to Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to operate a wholly owned subsidiary in a commoditized market.”
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/29857
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Zeichick’s Take: Radio moves from analog waveforms to digital packets
Streaming radio highlights the need for streaming applications to be designed to take up as little bandwidth as possible
|
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|