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Zeichick’s Take: Micro Focus acquisition is the end of the line for Borland

By Alan Zeichick

May 6, 2009 — When a company promotes its CFO to acting CEO instead of advancing a sales or product executive, that’s a good sign that the company’s going to be sold soon.

That’s what I wrote on Jan. 8 in “Borland back in the frying pan,” after the news that CEO Todd Nielsen had jumped ship to join VMware. It’s taken a mere four months for that predication to come true.

The news today: Micro Focus, known for its COBOL tools, is buying Borland for about US$75 million. That’s a dollar per share, a juicy premium over the company’s average-day closing price of 60 cents per share.

Ted Bahr, my partner at BZ Media, summed it up nicely in a tweet: “Don’t mourn the sale to Micro Focus. Borland has been dead for years, and the products you loved were bought by Embarcadero a few months ago.”

The Embarcadero connection is that Borland sold its tools subsidiary, CodeGear, to the database tool maker back in May 2008.

Micro Focus will be a good steward of Borland’s mishmash of application life-cycle management, mainly cobbled together from acquisitions. It will be a better steward than Borland's previous chief executives, Nielsen and former CFO Erik Prusch. The question is, of course, how much impact these products will have in the marketplace, even under new management. Borland had become a very minor player in ALM.

Also today, Micro Focus purchased some products from Compuware. To quote from Compuware’s press release, Compuware “has signed an agreement for Micro Focus to acquire assets from Compuware's Quality Solutions product line, including development, sales and customer-support teams, as well as specific technologies. The $80 million transaction is expected to close this quarter and will impact about 330 employees.”

Bottom line: Borland is gone, and good riddance. Ted Bahr is right: Few should mourn its passing. The differentiation is now clear: If you want ALM suites, go to Micro Focus. If you want application performance management tools, go to Compuware. And if you want developer tools, go to Embarcadero.

Alan Zeichick is editorial director of SD Times. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/zeichick. Read his blog at ztrek.blogspot.com.

Related Search Term(s): Borland, Compuware, Micro Focus

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Micro Focus acquires Compuware quality tools, all of Borland Compuware's Quality Solutions line will go to Micro Focus for $80 million, while Borland is selling at $1 a share. Macehiter Ward-Dutton's Bola Rotibi weighs in on the sales.

Borland acquisition now in doubt An unnamed company has made a counter proposal to Micro Focus's bid for Borland, which Borland has taken under consideration.

Compuware bets its life on application performance The decision to sell off its testing and quality products was made to sharpen the company’s focus on performance, where executives believe the greatest growth potential exists.

Comments

05/06/2009 03:37:18 PM EST

Alan - thanks letting everyone know where to go for developer (and database) tools. As a former employee of Borland (started there in June 1985), I read the news today too. We are definitely continuing the innovation in software and database tooling here at Embarcadero Technologies (they purchased us from Borland last July). We have also recently introduced JOptimizer and DB Optimizer 1.5 that provide performance and tuning tooling for Java and databases to help improve application performance. Embarcadero also has Performance Center for monitoring the performance of database applications. I always love reading your posts - keep it up!!!

David Intersione "David I"

05/06/2009 03:58:42 PM EST

Alan, I would have said it a bit differently... If you want testing tools, go to Micro Focus (after you decided that open source or either HP/Mercury, IBM, or Microsoft aren't good enough). ALM suites are sold by IBM, Serena, and MKS.

René Bonvanie

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Micro Focus acquires Compuware quality tools, all of Borland
Compuware's Quality Solutions line will go to Micro Focus for $80 million, while Borland is selling at $1 a share. Macehiter Ward-Dutton's Bola Rotibi weighs in on the sales Read More...

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