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Public (NASDAQ: BORL )
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Excellence Endures
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California (1983)
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Cupertino, California
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Tod Nielsen , CEO<br /> Philippe Kahn , Founder
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1300 est (2005)
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Computer Software
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C++Builder , CaliberRM , Delphi , JBuilder , Kylix , Optimizeit , StarTeam , Together , VisiBroker
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$3095 million USD (2004)
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is a
Software company headquartered in
California . It was founded by
Philippe Kahn in 1983. It is best known for its software development tools, especially the
Turbo Pascal programming tool that has evolved into today's
Delphi . The company also produces
Application Lifecycle Management tools and sells consulting and education services.
The Borland name (but not the company which exists today) started with a small company in Ireland. Three Danish citizens, Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad founded Borland Ltd. in August 1981 to develop products for the CP/M operating system using the name of an off-the-shelf company.Intersimone After their products were exhibited at the CP/M-82 show in San Francisco, the company went bankrupt.
The company which would eventually become known as "Borland International," MIT ("Market in Time"), was founded in California in 1982 by
Philippe Kahn . MIT had done some consulting work for Borland Ltd. and was owed $7,500. When MIT asked Kahn's company to change it's name, he acquired the rights to the "Borland" name from the bankruptcy court. Kahn took Borland public on the
London Stock Exchange in 1986. A secondary stock offering on
NASDAQ happened in 1988. The company's personnel then included Philippe Kahn as CEO, Chairman, and President, and
Spencer Ozawa as Vice President Operations in the US. Later personnel included Marie Bourget as CFO and Gregor Freund as Director of European Operations.
Borland developed a series of well-regarded software development tools. Their first product was
Turbo Pascal , using the compiler developed by
Anders Hejlsberg . 1984 saw the launch of
SideKick , a time organization, notebook and calculator utility, notable for being a
Terminate And Stay Resident (TSR) program.
In 1987 Borland purchased Wizard Systems and incorporated portions of the Wizard C technology into
Turbo C . Bob Jarvis, the author of Wizard C became a Borland employee. Turbo C was released on 18 May 1987 and an estimated 100,000 copies were shipped in the first month of its release.
In September 1987 Borland purchased
Ansa-Software including their
Paradox (version 2.0)
Database management tool. Richard Schwartz, CEO of Ansa became Borland's CTO.
The
Quattro Pro spreadsheet was launched in 1989 with, at the time, a notable improvement and charting capabilities. Lotus development, under the leadership of
Jim Manzi sued Borland for copyright infringement. The litigation brought forward Borland's open standards position as opposed to Lotus' closed approach. Borland, under Philippe Kahn's leadership took a position of principle and announced that they would defend against Lotus' legal position and "fight for programmer's rights". After 6 years of litigation Borland's position got validated by the
Supreme Court Of The United States and Lotus lost the case.
Additionally, Borland was known for its practical and creative approach towards
Software Piracy and
Intellectual Property (IP), introducing its "Borland no-nonsense license agreement." This allowed the developer/user to utilize its products "just like a book"; he or she was allowed to make multiple copies of a program, as long as only one copy was in use at any point in time.
Borland also offered the full source code to many of its products, including editors, spreadsheets, chess games, and database engines.
In September 1991 Borland purchased
Ashton-Tate , bringing the
DBase and
InterBase databases to the house, in an all stock transaction. Competition with Microsoft was fierce. Microsoft used its dominance in opearting systems to shake Borland up.
Microsoft launched the competing database
Microsoft Access and bought the dBase clone
FoxPro in 1992, undercutting Borland's prices. Microsoft was focused on Borland and it must be noted that today Borland is the only company still standing among Microsoft's competitors at that time: Software Publishing, WordPerfect, Lotus and many others are all gone.
During the early
1990s Borland's implementation of
C++ was considered superior to then-market-trailing Microsoft. Also, its development of
Paradox , with its
ObjectPAL programming language, pitted it against software by Microsoft, in particular Access.
By the mid-1990s, Borland fell from dominance in the software tools market. Some people thought that competition from Microsoft was to blame. Microsoft used the same tactics as they did with spreadsheets, word processors, browsers and other software components.
A change in market conditions contributed to Borland's fall from prominence. In the 1980's, companies had few people who understood the growing personal computer phenomenon, and so most technical people were given free rein to purchase whatever software they thought they needed. Borland had done an excellent job marketing to those with a highly technical bent. By the mid-1990's, however, companies were beginning to ask what the return was on the investment they had made in this loosely controlled PC software buying spree. Company executives were starting to ask questions that were hard for technical folks to answer, and so corporate standards began to be created. This required new kinds of marketing and support materials from software vendors, but Borland remained focused on quality and software craftsmanship, which unfortunately seemed to matter less in a changed market. Rival software company Microsoft did a much better job of recognizing the changing market and shipping "adequate" solution that corporations were seeking and edging out Borland using their dominance with operating systems.
In October 1994, Borland sold Quattro Pro to
Novell for $140 Million in cash, repositioning the company on its core software development tools.
Philippe Kahn and the Borland board came to a disagreement on how to focus the company, and the Borland board of directors fired Kahn as CEO, President and Chairman of Borland, a position he had held for 12 years, in January 1995.Kellner, Krey, Jeffers, Parks Kahn remained on Borland board until November 7, 1996, when he resigned from that position.Borland press release Borland named
Gary Wetsel as CEO, but he resigned in July 1996.
William F. Miller was interim CEO until September of that year, when
Whitney G. Lynn became interim president and CEO.
The
Delphi 1 rapid application development (
RAD ) environment was launched in 1995, under the leadership of
Anders Hejlsberg .
On
November 25 ,
1996 ,
Del Yocam was hired as Borland CEO and Chairman.
In 1997, Borland sold
Paradox to
Corel . In November 1997, Borland acquired
Visigenic , a middleware company that was focused on implementations of
CORBA .
On
April 29 ,
1998 , Borland refocused its efforts on targeting enterprise applications development, and went through a name change to Inprise Corporation (the name came from the slogan ''Integrating the Enterprise''). The idea was to integrate Borland's tools, Delphi,
C++Builder , and
JBuilder with enterprise environment software, including Visigenic's implementations of CORBA,
Visibroker for C++ and Java, and the new emerging product,
Application Server .
For a number of years (both before and during the Inprise name) Borland suffered from serious financial losses and very poor public image. When the name was changed to Inprise, many thought Borland had gone out of business.
dBase was sold in 1999.
In 1999, in the middle of Borland's identity crisis,
Dale L. Fuller replaced CEO
Del Yocam . At this time Fuller's title was "interim president and CEO." The "interim" was dropped a few years later.
A proposed merger between Inprise and Corel was announced in February 2000, aimed at producing
Linux based products, however the scheme was abandoned when Corel's shares fell and it became clear that there was really no strategic fit.
InterBase 6.0 was made available as an
Open Source product in July 2000.
The Borland name (Borland Software Corporation) replaced Inprise in
January 2001 . The name Inprise was abandoned.
Under the Borland name and a new management team headed by President and CEO
Dale L. Fuller , a now-smaller and profitable Borland refocused on Delphi, and created a version of Delphi and C++Builder for Linux, both under the name
Kylix . This brought Borland's expertise in
Integrated Development Environment s to the Linux platform for the first time. Kylix was launched in 2001.
Plans to spin off the
InterBase division as a separate company were abandoned after Borland and the people who were to run the new company could not agree on terms for the separation. With the reenergized division under new management, Borland stopped open source releases of InterBase and has developed and sold new versions at a fast pace.
Borland made a commitment to the technology of
Web Services releasing Delphi 6 as the first Integrated Development Environment to support web services. Now all of their current development platforms support web services.
C#Builder was released in 2003 as a native
C# development tool, competing head-on with
Visual Studio .NET . As of the 2005 release, C#Builder, Delphi for Win32, and Delphi for .NET have been combined into a single IDE called "Borland Developer Studio" (though the combined IDE is still popularly known as "Delphi"). Supporting web services and now .NET is doing a lot to bolster Borland's image in the industry. With their consistent profitability, in late 2002 Borland purchased design tool vendor TogetherSoft and tool publisher
Starbase , makers of the
StarTeam configuration management tool and the
CaliberRM requirements management tool. The latest releases of
JBuilder and
Delphi integrate these tools to give developers a broader set of tools for development.
The rounded-out set of product offerings legitimized Borland's new claim to the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) market, with tools spanning the software development chain from requirements, through design and development, to testing and deployment. In 2004 Borland rolled out its Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) marketing tagline, pitching the idea that SDO encompassed ALM in addition to higher-level software manufacturing concepts like portfolio management and estimation tools.
Former CEO Dale Fuller resigned in July 2005 but remained on the board of directors. Former COO Scott Arnold took the title of interim president and chief executive officer until
November 8 ,
2005 , when it was announced that
Tod Nielsen would take over as CEO effective
November 9 ,
2005 .
In October 2005, Borland acquired Legadero, in order to add its IT Management and Governance (ITM&G) suite, called Tempo, to the Borland product line.
On
February 8 2006 Borland announced the divestiture of their IDE division, including
Delphi ,
JBuilder , and
InterBase . At the same time they announced the planned acquisition of
Segue Software , a maker of software test and quality tools, in order to concentrate on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).
On
March 20 2006 Borland said that it had acquired Gauntlet Systems, a provider of technology that screens software under development for quality and security.
Borland's current product line includes:
;Programming tools
;Utilities
;Applications
