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HOME >> OPINIONS

Short Takes: June 1, 2009

By SD Times News Team

June 1, 2009 — (Page 1 of 3)
Buh-bye Borland
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 came true.

The news: 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.

SD Times publisher Ted Bahr summed it up nicely in a Twitter 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.

Micro Focus also 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 of the product sets 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

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