Borland

Borland is a software company (NASDAQ NM: BORL ), headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA. Since 2009 it is a subsidiary of Micro Focus.

History

Borland was founded in 1983 by immigrants to the United States French mathematics teacher Philippe Kahn. Looking for an American- sounding name for his company he was from the name of a U.S. astronaut Frank Borman, inspired. Under Kahn's leadership, the company created a series of tools for software development. Borland was known in the 1980s by an integrated development environment for the programming language Pascal, which was brought out under the name Turbo Pascal operating systems CP / M and MS -DOS. The last available for DOS version 7.0 was named Borland Pascal. On Windows, this product has evolved to Borland Delphi. Borland was also successful with Sidekick, one of the first personal information manager, and developed further "Turbo" IDEs, including for the programming languages ​​BASIC and Prolog. But in the long run only Delphi and Borland C implementation could prevail against the Microsoft development tools were considered superior to the early 1990s.

With its proprietary database Paradox Borland was the early 1990s, in direct competition with Microsoft Access, the newly entered the market at that time. In order to strengthen its position in the database market, Borland bought in September 1991, the much larger company Ashton- Tate, producers of the then market-leading PC database system dBASE and the Framework Programme, and promoted the modernization of dBase. Even the recently acquired by Ashton- Tate database system InterBase has been further developed.

Since the mid- 1990s, Borland lost more and more its dominant position in the market for software tools. Some say it is the competition with Microsoft to blame, others believe that Philippe Kahn frittered away the resources of his company in too many projects as he tried to fight on many fronts at the same time against Microsoft.

In 1998, Borland Inprise Corporation and renamed it focused - away from developer tools - more on the market for the development of business applications and middleware tools and got into the internet market -oriented tools such as a JBuilder. Over several years, losses have been run, the image deteriorated. With the name change came even get the impression that the company no longer exists. In 1999, the rights to dBASE to the dataBased Intelligence Inc. were sold and later the sale of InterBase on the company Embarcadero Technologies.

Later, again under the traditional name Borland and under the leadership of CEO Scott Arnold, the company was smaller, but it profitable again. Borland initially developed further the development environment Delphi and C Builder. A foray into areas beyond the development on Microsoft operating systems was Kylix, which for the first time " natively " available for Linux made ​​Borland's experience in the field of integrated development environments. This product, however, remained unsuccessful. In addition, C # Builder was presented, a development environment for the development of Microsoft. NET C # language. Support for Web Services and. NET (since Delphi 8 ) the reputation of Borland in the industry has strengthened again.

With the 2005 editions of their tools Borland broke the first time by a simple numbering of the versions: JBuilder 11 ( the successor of JBuilder 10) was now called JBuilder 2005, Delphi 9 was officially called Delphi 2005 in the Delphi 2005 IDE was the first time the programming languages ​​Delphi. and C # together ( under pressure from the developer community could be created in Delphi programs for both Win32 and. NET ). Accordingly, the C # Builder was officially discontinued and was henceforth included in Delphi. As part of Borland Developer Studio ( BDS) contains Delphi 2006 also support for the programming language C .

The successful integration of the businesses Soft Together (Together Control Center) and Starbase ( configuration and change Managenment solutions, requirements management solutions ) was an important step within three years for Borland.

In 2005 was added in the CMMI and Process consulting firm TeraQuest, which was considered one of the most successful global CMMI consulting firms. Bill Curtis, co-founder of CMM was working for Borland in a leading position. Finally, in 2006 Segue Software was acquired to complement the portfolio of software for automated and manual testing.

Meanwhile, Borland offers a highly integrated ALM solution portfolio ( Application Lifecycle Management ) that the entire cycle of software development from the recording and management of requirements on the modeling of the application and the Ausprogrammierung on automated testing to the development of the application " of a piece allows ".

Borland consistently focuses on a process-oriented, CMMI and ITIL elements comprehensive strategy SDO ( Software Delivery Optimization), what value aspects and the business processes of software development provides the foreground of any IT career.

In February 2006, Borland announced that the line of development environments (Delphi, JBuilder, etc. ) for sale and henceforth to focus exclusively on the area of ALM. The IDE division was indeed spun off into a separate company called CodeGear, however, remained initially owned by Borland.

On September 5, 2006 Borland resurrect the " Turbo " series again - " Turbo Delphi Win32 ", " Turbo Delphi. net ", " Turbo C # "and" Turbo C " to the freely available " advertise Explorer 'versions back more programmers for the IDE products from Borland.

On 7 May 2008, it was announced that the subsidiary was sold CodeGear to Embarcadero Technologies.

On 6 May 2009 it was announced that the company will be acquired by Micro Focus International PLC for $ 75 million dollars.

Products

The current product range of Borland includes:

  • CaliberRDM
  • CaliberRM
  • Together
  • Gauntlet (Software)
  • Silk Central ( formerly SilkCentral Test Manager )
  • SilkTest
  • Silk4J and Silk4Net
  • SilkPerformer
  • StarTeam
  • Borland AppServer
  • VisiBroker

Former developments Borland are:

  • DBASE (acquired by Ashton- Tate )
  • InterBase (acquired by Ashton- Tate )
  • JBuilder (sold to Embarcadero Technologies)
  • Borland Database Engine - database interface
  • Borland Paradox - A relational database management system (sold to Corel )
  • Quattro Pro - spreadsheet (sold to Corel )
  • Reflex
  • Sidekick
  • Turbo Basic (sold to PowerBASIC Inc.)
  • Turbo C, Borland C , C Builder (sold to Embarcadero Technologies)
  • Turbo Modula-2
  • Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal, Delphi (sold to Embarcadero Technologies)
  • Turbo Prolog
  • Turbo Assembler, TASM short, incl Turbo Linker
  • Turbo Debugger (later bundled with the TASM )
  • WordPerfect (acquired by Novell sold to Corel )
  • Object vision
  • Kylix
  • Eureka ( program to solve mathematical problems )
Austin (Texas) MS-DOS Embarcadero Delphi Borland Sidekick Framework (office suite) Kylix (software) .NET Framework C Sharp (programming language) Borland Together Capability Maturity Model Borland Turbo C
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