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Borland
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Borland Software Corporation is a software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.
In February 2006, Borland announced its intent to divest its IDE business, known as the Developer Tools Group, to allow Borland to be completely focused on the enterprise and driving its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) business forward. As part of that plan, Borland acquired Segue Software Inc.
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Encyclopedia
Borland Software Corporation is a software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.
In February 2006, Borland announced its intent to divest its IDE business, known as the Developer Tools Group, to allow Borland to be completely focused on the enterprise and driving its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) business forward. As part of that plan, Borland acquired Segue Software Inc. (NASDAQ CM: SEGU), a provider of software quality and testing tools.
In November 2006, the company announced its decision to separate the Developer Tools Group into a wholly owned subsidiary called CodeGear.
On May 7, 2008, the company announced it had sold the CodeGear subsidiary to Embarcadero Technologies for $23 million.
History
The 1980s: Foundations
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 an off-the-shelf company. However, response to the company's products at the CP/M-82 show in San Francisco showed that a U.S. company would be needed to reach the American market. They met Philippe Kahn who had just moved to Silicon Valley and had been a key developer of the Micral. The three Danes had embarked, at first successfully, on marketing software first from Denmark, later from Ireland before running into some challenges at the time when they met Philippe Kahn. The partnership seems to have benefited all involved. Philippe Kahn was at all times Chairman, President and CEO of Borland Inc. from its inception in 1983 until he left in 1995. Main shareholders at the incorporation of Borland were Niels Jensen (250,000 shares), Ole Henriksen (160,000), Mogens Glad (100,000) and Philippe Kahn (80,000).
Borland successfully launched a series of blockbusters that included Sidekick, Turbo Pascal, SuperKey and Lightning, all developed in Denmark. According to the London IPO filings, the management team was Philippe Kahn as President, Spencer Ozawa as VP of Operations, Marie Bourget as CFO, Spencer Leyton as VP of business development, while all software development was continuing to take place in Denmark and later London as the Danish co-founders moved there. While the Danes remained majority shareholders, Board members were Philippe Kahn, Tim Berry, John Nash and David Heller. With the assistance of John Nash and David Heller, both British members of the Borland Board, the company was taken public on London's Unlisted Securities Market (USM) in 1986. Shroders was the lead investment banker.
A first US IPO followed in 1989 after Ben Rosen joined the Borland board with Goldman as the lead banker and a second offering in 1991 with Lazard as the lead banker. All offerings were very successful and over-subscribed.
Borland developed a series of well-regarded software development tools. Its 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 1985 Borland acquired Analytica and its Reflex database product. The engineering team of Analytica, managed by Brad Silverberg and including Reflex co-founder Adam Bosworth became the core of Borland's engineering team in the USA. Brad Silverberg was VP of engineering until he left in early 1990 to head up the Personal Systems division at Microsoft. Adam Bosworth initiated and headed up the Quattro project until moving to Microsoft later in 1990 to take over the project which eventually became Access.
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. This apparently drove a wedge between Borland and Niels Jensen and the other members of his team who had been working on compilers. An agreement was reached and they spun-off a company called TopSpeed. They launched a compiler that became TopSpeed Modula-2 which exists today as the underlying technology of the Clarion 4GL Programming Language, a Windows development tool.
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 and Ben Rosen joined the Borland board.
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 (see "look and feel"). The litigation brought forward Borland's open standards position as opposed to Lotus' closed approach. Borland, under 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 the United States Supreme Court validated Borland's position 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.
The 1990s: Rise and change
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 launched the competing database Microsoft Access and bought the dBase clone FoxPro in 1992, undercutting Borland's prices. During the early 1990s Borland's implementation of C and C++ outsold Microsoft's. Borland survived as a company, but no longer had the dominance in software tools that it once had. It has gone through a radical transition in products, financing, and staff, now a very different company from the one which challenged Microsoft and Lotus in the early 1990s.
The internal problems that arose with the Ashton-Tate merger were a large part of the fall. Ashton-Tate's product portfolio proved to be weak, with no provision for evolution into the GUI environment of Windows. Almost all product lines were discontinued. The consolidation of duplicate support and development offices was costly and disruptive. Worst of all, the highest revenue earner of the combined company was dBASE with no Windows version ready. Borland had had an internal project to clone dBASE which was intended to run on Windows and was part of the strategy of the acquisition, but by late 1992 this was abandoned due to technical flaws and the company had to constitute a replacement team (the ObjectVision |
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