Borland pins its hopes on Linux

Sydney

The third annual Borland Conference for Australia and Zealand, BorCon 2000, was inaugurated here in Sydney, Australia, among psychedelic lights and a gathering of around 350 delegates from Australia, New Zealand and China. 

Inprise Corp, nee Borland, is a major global development tools vendor, with products like Delphi, Jbuilder, InterBase. In his keynote address, President and CEO Dale Fuller said that Inprise is the largest manufacturer of Java development tools in the world. Jbuilder (an end-to-end apps development tool "that integrates Web and enterprise development with a scalable and productive team development environment") contributes a third of Borland's total revenue. Fuller added that there are now about seven million Visual Basic developers and two million Delphi developers, compared with about three million Java developers. 

Veterans remember Borland from the 1980s as one of the pioneers of tools for PC software development, most notably its integrated development environments for DOS (Turbo Pascal, Turbo Basic, Turbo C, et al) and later Windows. It is also known for dBASE, which it acquired, and its own Delphi object-oriented Windows development environment. In the mid and late 1990s Borland tried diversifying into areas such as office suites, losing focus on its core area. It finally abandoned the Quattro Pro package, got out of suites, and experimented with a change of image and name--to Inprise. However, it discovered over the years that far more people know the Borland name, and it has since then been using Borland alongside Inprise most of the time.

Inprise had been written off by analysts, who questioned if it would see a new millennium. It has now done a turnaround (largely credited to Fuller, who joined a year and a half ago) and has cash reserves of $ 250 million. It was in the news early this year, when it got into talks for an acquisition by Canada's Corel Corp, a floundering graphics applications giant which, like Inprise, is actively dabbling in Linux. The merger was aborted.

Now Inprise has, to the probable relief of both shareholders and the development community, decided to maintain its focus on the development community, and extend its product range beyond Windows, to Linux and the Mac. 

In fact a focus of this conference was project Kylix, a key move for Inprise--to support Linux with versions of Delphi and C++Builder. This has created much more excitement than any of Borland's earlier moves since Delphi, including its office suite foray. Replacing the Delphi's Window-only Visual Component Library (VCL), the new CLX will provide a library of native Linux components. When Kylix ships (the final product name will be different) the apps it creates will be easily movable between Linux and Windows. (CNS)