Borland to offer 'cockpit' for piloting ALM projects

By Robert Mullins

July 14, 2008 —

Borland Software is planning a trio of software offerings that provide what the company called a needed management layer over the range of products that are used for application life-cycle management (ALM).

Borland Management Solutions (BMS), due out this fall, plugs into a company’s ALM infrastructure, which typically is made up of different tools for each step of the software-building process, said Rick Jackson, Borland’s senior vice president of corporate strategy.

“The customers that we see, especially in the Global 2000, are cobbling together best-of-breed products, trying to create an integrated solution, and they are failing,” Jackson said.

By releasing BMS, Borland fulfills a strategic plan it mapped out two or three years ago to provide this kind of management layer, said Jim Duggan, an analyst with Gartner. That strategy has been taking shape amid what he called the “long-running soap opera” that has defined Borland for years.

In May, Borland finally sold its CodeGear division to Embarcadero Technologies for US$23 million, removing what had been a source of friction within Borland, said Duggan. He noted that the IDE business of CodeGear was fundamentally different from Borland’s ALM tools business. ALM is high cost and low volume, while CodeGear’s IDEs were low cost and high volume.

Investment analysts would visit Borland and hear complaints from Borland and CodeGear executives about each other, Duggan recalled. “They’d say, ‘Those lunatics across the hall, they’re going to ruin us, and vice versa,’ ” he said.

Borland had brought in Tod Nielsen as CEO in 2005 and Erik Prusch as CFO in 2006 to try to turn the company around. Besides operating CodeGear as a business unit, Borland cut costs, moving its headquarters from its longtime home in Scotts Valley, Calif. to less-expensive offices in Austin, where the labor market is also cheaper than it is in Silicon Valley.

Yet, troubles persisted. Borland reported a net loss of $61.7 million in 2007 and another $22 million in the first quarter of 2008. Borland’s stock has been selling below $2 since April.

While Borland has been innovative, its execution has been less so, Duggan added. Often, the company has been unable to compete with industry giants like IBM and Microsoft.

“It’s been Borland’s lot to get the ideas out there,” Duggan said, “and then get trampled in the rush as everybody grabs share from them.”

A customer can use any or all of the three BMS products to provide a “cockpit” for monitoring the application life cycle: TeamDemand, which helps align software requirements to actual business needs; TeamFocus, which serves as a dashboard to monitor the progress of application development; and Team Analytics, a set of business intelligence tools that measure the performance of the software.

Some of Borland’s Global 2000 customers are already using BMS under an early-access program launched this year, but the product won’t be generally available until the fall, Jackson said. No pricing information was discussed as part of the announcement.

Although some of the capabilities in BMS might duplicate what is available in the individual ALM tools, BMS lets the user interact directly with the information already in the tools, he said.

“We’re trying not to displace them, but complement them with an end-to-end process framework and end-to-end management environment that sees all, monitors all,” Jackson noted.

Only Borland and IBM Rational offer such an end-to-end suite of ALM tools, Jackson said, though he added that BMS beats the IBM offering in end-to-end management.

Other vendors fall short in their efforts to provide end-to-end ALM, Jackson argued. Some companies that use Microsoft’s Visual Studio, for example, turn to Borland’s Caliber for requirements management because Microsoft doesn’t “have an answer for that.” Likewise, he added, Visual Studio users also turn to Hewlett-Packard’s tools—or at least the ones it acquired with Mercury Interactive—for quality verification.

In other situations, when development managers employ Microsoft tools, it’s to use PowerPoint or Excel to create their own progress reports, making for a laborious process, noted Chuck Maples, vice president of application development at Borland, which has been using BMS internally for about a year.

“Reporting through PowerPoint and Excel is a thing of the past,” Maples said. “Days spent guessing and haranguing my teams for progress updates are also gone.”

Related Search Term(s): ALM, Borland, IBM

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ALM market rolls along with CodeGear sale Beyond Borland's sale of CodeGear to Embarcadero, 2008 was mainly about updates to existing products in the ALM market. In particular, MKS revamped its integration with Eclipse, while Seapine updated its Surround SCM.

ALM takes root at Microsoft Microsoft is showing that it is serious about application life-cycle management tools with its upcoming release of Visual Studio Team System 2010. The move may threaten established ALM tool makers like IBM, and third parties that provided ALM features for Visual Studio may be diminished.

IBM implements static analysis in AppScan update The two latest editions of Rational AppScan feature tighter integration with IDEs like Eclipse, and they can use a variety of analysis techniques to scan for problems in code. The new features should be useful in dealing with false positives, IBM says.

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