Integration Watch: A Micro Focus, but what’s the vision?
June 15, 2009 —
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As many readers discovered last month, part of Compuware’s product line is now property of Micro Focus, an English firm famed for its current dominant COBOL tools. Micro Focus also acquired the remains of what was once Borland. (Previously, CodeGear, the division of Borland that made IDEs—notably C++Builder, JBuilder and Delphi—had been sold to Embarcadero Technologies). The remains, which I’ll discuss in a minute, were what Micro Focus purchased.
The wheeling and dealing had all the feel of a three-team baseball transaction in which the teams acquire and unload players to make a stretch run. And, as in baseball, the nature of the trade showed companies going in different directions in the same area.
Let’s start with Compuware, as it’s the easiest. For a very long time, Compuware has had two sets of product lines: one oriented to mainframes and enterprise back-room operations, and one for Java and .NET developers. The latter products established the company’s name at many IT sites due to their consistent high quality.
But for all this acclaim, Compuware was never able to really establish its line of QA and quality-management products: Optimal Trace, File-AID/CS, QA Director and other tools. In May of last year, the company announced a restructuring of its product offerings, dubbed “Compuware 2.0.” Products that were neither market-leading nor core to its established lines were to be cut free; this sale was part of that process.
Its purchase by Micro Focus is difficult to explain. Micro Focus is exclusively a COBOL and PL/I product vendor. Every tool feeds into that mission. Its acquisition of Borland’s application life-cycle management tools is an attempt to provide a true end-to-end mainframe and enterprise product line.
The problem is that the Borland tool chain consists of many links that don’t interlock very well. They include Caliber (requirements), StarTeam (SCM), Silk (testing) and some project-management tools gathered under the “Team” moniker. Of these, the consensus is that the Silk testing tools, which were acquired from Segue, are the best and the only ones that could truly compete head-to-head with offerings from bigger companies. So, with this in mind, it’s difficult to see why Micro Focus would pay Compuware US$80 million for the tools that directly overlap the strongest part of the Borland suite.
Related Search Term(s): Micro Focus
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