December 27, 2006
Borland's CodeGear Rises From The AshesBy Stacy Cowley
CodeGear is trying to win back the trust of its partners and users, after years of Borland neglecting the developer tools that were once the industry's vanguard.
After years of neglecting its storied Developer Tools Group, Borland announced earlier this year that it would sell the division off. Nine months of quiet negotiations later, Borland changed its mind, opting to instead keep the group as an independent subsidiary.
Now, CEO Ben Smith is in charge of building CodeGear, revitalizing the developer tools it inherits from Borland, and winning back the trust of customers and partners burned by Borland's cavalier treatment. "We see the news as a great step forward. Finally, there is some stability," Raize Software President Ray Konopka, a longtime Borland partner, said about the creation of CodeGear. "There's not the doom and gloom that was happening a year ago at this time." Smith and the 100-plus employees CodeGear is taking from Borland are in the process of developing a road map that will spotlight venerable tools like Turbo, Delphi and JBuilder, software that helped create the IDE (integrated development environment) market two decades ago. Borland, which will now concentrate on the ALM (application lifecycle management) market, faced a quandary over the future of its developer tools: With open-source tools like Eclipse skyrocketing in popularity, commercial companies are struggling to hold on to paying customers. Smith dismisses the notion that CodeGear is charging into a dying market. "People told me the same thing about PCs -- that they were standardizing on Intel architecture and you can't make any money. I think that's just crap," he said in a recent interview. "This is the way the tech business works: When the biz gets commoditized, you innovate on top of that layer. The guys who innovate fastest are the ones who make the money." CodeGear's innovation plans include a move into tools for dynamic languages like PHP and Ruby, the new development darlings thanks to their suitability for Web development. The company also plans a "pretty massive" adoption of open-source technologies, Smith said. Rather than fighting the rise of platforms like Eclipse, CodeGear will work with them. Last year, it embraced Eclipse as the foundation of future JBuilder releases. "There's no way we could bring out the dynamic stuff we're bringing out later this year if we didn't have Eclipse," Smith said. Building a stronger partner program is among Smith's priorities, but it will take time -- CodeGear is still looking to hire a channel chief. That person will have some fences to mend. NEXT: What's Up With Kylix? 
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