Engineering Development Process
Borland's application lifecycle management solutions strategy promotes higher productivity from the development team.
September 6, 2005
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Scott Arnold
President and CEO
Borland
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Rick Jackson
Chief Marketing Officer
Borland
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Borland Software Corporation is evolving its focus on a software development process solution set that seeks to boost developer productivity within the context of the entire development team. Its application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions incorporate requirements management, configuration management, lifecycle, and productivity tools that collectively round out its globally distributed development and migration solutions offerings. To find out the motivation behind Borland's ALM strategy, FTPOnline editors met with Borland's Scott Arnold, president and CEO, and Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer, to discuss ALM and other technology trends.
FTPOnline: You're in a new position, although you've been at Borland for a while. Why don't you talk a little about why you're in this position.
Scott Arnold: I think the reason I'm still at Borland is because there are problems that haven't yet been solved around software development. In a way, we haven't holistically helped companies get good value from their software. Many people have approached it from one angle or another, largely from a technology perspective alone. There's a unique opportunity to help make technology and process work together in a way that fundamentally changes the way people can get value from software.
For a long time we were an IDE company, and I think our focus on the developer has aged. What we've grown up into is a view that developers are only as good as the teams around them. Helping make developers productive as members of a team is the way we are evolving our focus as a company, and that's what we have to do to solve this broader problem.
FTPOnline: Today companies have all kinds of technologies mixed into their environments—Java IDE tools, .NET, lifecycle tools. Where do you expect to be in the next five years with all this?
Arnold: We increasingly think about our business as cross-platform because most of our customers tell us that they're thinking about their app dev that way. In fact, customers increasingly [are involved with] development projects using .NET and Java. It's been a promise for a long time that [we will build] architecture and ways that make those technologies work side by side, but now we are hearing from our customers that this is actually coming true. That's very exciting for us, given our positioning, as neither IBM nor Microsoft is complementary to both. Increasingly, we don't see them as separate. Today our IDE business is roughly a third of the margin of our overall business. The application lifecycle management goes beyond just the IDE life requirements management, and modeling and SCM are about another third or so.
Rick Jackson: An important distinction to make is that ALM can probably encompass what we traditionally refer to as the market segment of IDE. You have to have the developer role and the development process in the application lifecycle. So rather than take it and treat it as a standalone IDE business, the strategy that we've been executing around it is to move that into the rest of the ALM solution. JBuilder is moving toward Eclipse as the foundation for our ALM product suite. We think of it as a developer role that we're supporting in the application lifecycle. You really see that a traditional IDE stream merges in with ALM and then we take that whole thing forward.
FTPOnline: You mentioned integrated projects where the high level of IT is concerned, but you still see silos of technology. That tells us that your message remains at a higher level in terms of integration. And we hear that the developers, managers, and architects are buying tools that are still silo-oriented. Is that a problem or an opportunity?
Arnold: We see it as a huge opportunity. For many of the functions that analysts or architects need to do, there's no reason why those tools have to be constrained to one development language or another. So we see building good, profit-developing software and delivering value from it is a plus. It doesn't have to translate all of the language you choose for coding. In fact, it's all the more powerful if you already choose a language for a common task in a way that is [extraneous to] the cost by virtue of the modeling you're doing or the way you're managing requirements, or the way you're managing change requests or version control across the projects.
Jackson: I think, dare I say, that what you're describing is the vast part of the problems that many IT organizations are now dealing with—decades of silos and technology-driven projects. Now I have 20 ways of calculating sales tax on my widgets across my enterprise. So if you can imagine the policy movement toward enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture, there is the desire to move to a model where it's about IT assets and not technology stacks. We feel that we're very well positioned for that because of our independence in the marketplace and independence of platforms and technology stacks, so we want to support that.
Recently we held a customer advisory board with a handful of Fortune 500-type companies that are members of our advisory board here in the Silicon Valley, and they said that on average a third of their projects are now cross-technology. And that I found to be very interesting because having spent a lot of my past working with companies around SOA and enterprise architecture, that is now transcending into actual app layers and implementations of software. So that seems to be happening.
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