Borland

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Borland is a software company headquartered in Austin , Texas , USA . It has been a subsidiary of Micro Focus since 2009 .

history

Borland was founded in 1983 by the French math teacher Philippe Kahn , who immigrated to the USA . In his search for an American-sounding name for his company, he was inspired by the name of a US astronaut, Frank Borman . Under Kahn's direction, the company created a range of software development tools. Borland became known in the 1980s for an integrated development environment for the Pascal programming language , which was released under the name Turbo Pascal under the CP / M and MS-DOS operating systems . The last version 7.0 available for DOS was called Borland Pascal . Under Windows this product was further developed to Borland Delphi . Borland was also successful with SideKick , one of the first personal information managers , and developed other “turbo” IDE's, including: a. for the programming languages BASIC and Prolog . In the long run, however, only Delphi and Borland's C ++ implementations, which were considered superior to Microsoft's development tools in the early 1990s, could prevail .

In the early 1990s, Borland's Paradox database , which was developed in-house, was in direct competition with Microsoft's Access , which was just coming onto the market at the time. In order to strengthen its position in the database market, Borland bought the much larger company Ashton-Tate in September 1991 , manufacturer of the then market-leading PC database system dBASE and the Framework program , and pushed the modernization of dBase. The InterBase database system recently acquired by Ashton-Tate has also been further developed.

Since the mid-1990s Borland has increasingly lost its dominant position in the software tool market. Some believe that it was because of the competition with Microsoft, others believe that Philippe Kahn wasted his company's resources on too many projects when he tried to fight Microsoft on many fronts at the same time.

In 1998 Borland renamed itself Inprise Corporation and concentrated - away from developer tools - more on the market for developing business applications and middleware tools and entered the market for Internet-oriented tools such as JBuilder . Losses were incurred over several years and the image deteriorated. The name change even gave the impression that the company no longer existed. In 1999 the rights to dBASE were sold to dataBased Intelligence Inc. and InterBase was later sold to Embarcadero Technologies .

Later, again under the traditional name Borland and under the leadership of CEO Scott Arnold , the company became smaller, but profitable again. Borland initially continued to develop the Delphi and C ++ Builder development environments . A foray into areas beyond development on Microsoft operating systems was Kylix , who made Borland's experience in the area of integrated development environments available “natively” for Linux for the first time . This product was unsuccessful. In addition, the C # Builder was presented, a development environment for the .NET programming language C # developed by Microsoft . Support for Web Services and .NET (since Delphi 8) has restored Borland's reputation in the industry.

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

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

In 2005, the CMMI and process consulting company TeraQuest was added, which was considered to be one of the most successful global CMMI consulting companies. Bill Curtis, co-founder of CMM , served in a senior position at Borland. Finally, in 2006, Segue Software was acquired in order to supplement the portfolio with software for automated and manual testing.

Borland now offers a highly integrated ALM solution portfolio (Application Lifecycle Management), which covers the entire cycle of software development from the recording and management of requirements, to the modeling of the application and programming, to automatic testing and the development of the application. from a single source ”.

Borland focuses consistently on a process-oriented SDO strategy (Software Delivery Optimization) that includes CMMI and ITIL elements, which sees value-added aspects and business processes of software development in the foreground of all IT activities.

In February 2006 Borland announced that it would sell the product line of development environments (Delphi, JBuilder etc.) and henceforth concentrate exclusively on the area of ALM. The IDE division was spun off into its own company called CodeGear , but initially remained owned by Borland.

On September 5, 2006 Borland revived the “Turbo” series - “Turbo Delphi Win32”, “Turbo Delphi. net ”,“ Turbo C # ”and“ Turbo C ++ ”are to recruit more programmers for Borland's IDE products with the free“ Explorer ”versions.

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

On May 6, 2009, it was announced that the company would be acquired by Micro Focus International PLC for $ 75 million. At the time, Borland had around 750 employees.