Borland Updates Portfolio Progress at JavaOne

Borland Software is rolling out a handful of announcements at the JavaOne conference that deal with
the increasingly important concept of application lifecycle management
(ALM), a market IDC expects to top $2.69 billion in 2007.

The Scotts Valley, Calif. business unveiled Borland Enterprise Studio 6,
which integrates the various stages in ALM. Borland, along with other
software development tools makers, believes a complete ALM will make life
easier for programmers writing Java applications, which is the overarching
theme at JavaOne in San Francisco this week.

The vendor also made two of its developer suites, Caliber RM and StarTeam,
available in different languages to enable more global use, and will
distribute Borland Together Edition for SAP NetWeaver Studio and Together
Edition for Eclipse with the blessing of SAP and IBM.

As the last major independent software tools maker, Borland is in an
interesting position. It simultaneously competes and works with software
vendors such as Microsoft and IBM, which guide different development
environments in Visual Studio.NET and Eclipse, respectively. Borland has
been extremely busy working with .NET of late. Last week, the outfit unveiled
C#Builder for the .NET Framework. Borland also competed fiercely with fellow
independent Rational Software before IBM grabbed that firm last fall, and
continues to compete with the brand tucked under Big Blue.

Studio 6 consists of smaller suites, each covering a step in ALM, including
Borland CaliberRM (definition) Together Edition for JBuilder 6.1 (design),
JBuilder 9 (development), Optimizeit Suite 5.5 (testing), Borland Enterprise
Server 5.2, JDataStore 6 (deployment), and Borland StarTeam (management).

The goal of the suite is to let enterprises build and deploy Java
applications across multiple platforms without the problem of being locked
in to any one vendor’s technology, according to Tony de la Lama, VP and GM
of the Borland Together Solutions Group.

Describing Borland as the “Switzerland of software,” de la Lama told
internetnews.com Studio 6 for Java includes tighter integration
between JBuilder, the company’s primary Java application-building software,
and Together Edition for JBuilder. Borland has also created as mobile
edition of JBuilder, and plans to sell it along with Sony Ericsson’s Java
Software Development Kit (SDK). Studio 6 also features new integration with
Borland StarTeam and the inclusion of StarTeam Personal Edition, which
provide role-specific visualization and modeling in one framework to ensure
better collaboration.

All of the new solutions feature technology from Borland’s acquisitions of
rivals TogetherSo
ft and Starbase
.

Thomas Murphy, senior program director at Meta Group, said: “This is what
the acquisitions were all about: create a company with all the pieces of the
application life-cycle and integrate them in a seamless fashion similar to
the way that Together/J integrated modeling and coding. In some ways, its
the same message Rational had back when they started buying companies…”

One difference Murphy noted between Borland’s and rival Rational’s strategy
is that Rational didn’t have anything to “integrate around” so they created
the Rational Unified Process (RUP), a Web-enabled software engineering
process to be the circle. “Integration was really around Rose [Rational’s
visual modeling tool] and the model,” he told internetnews.com. “Now
the recognition is you need to integrate around the developer and therefore
around the IDE. Borland is moving forward rapidly and I believe is ahead of
other IDE’s in producing tools that integrate the entire application
development life-cycle. This is what they call ALM and what we call the ILDE
(Integrated Life-cycle Development Environment).”

Borland Enterprise Studio 6
for Java is available immediately.

Borland also expanded its footprint outside the U.S., introducing the first
globalized versions of StarTeam 5.3 and CaliberRM 5.1, which will now be
cast in multiple languages. Crafted from technology assets acquired in the
Starbase buy, Borland StarTeam 5.3 is an automated configuration and change
management system and CaliberRM 5.1 is an enterprise requirements management
suite for collaboration. The new version of CaliberRM is also better
integrated with Borland VisiBroker, which allows embedded software to
interoperate with CORBA-compliant enterprise applications.

CaliberRM and StarTeam also now feature electronic signature capabilities to
help pharmaceutical and medical device markets deliver safer products,
faster while meeting compliance standards. Both products are available now
from resellers.

In an embrace of a competing platform, Borland unveiled Borland Together
Edition for Eclipse, to provide modeling, design, and quality assurance for
the Eclipse platform, a project
spearheaded by IBM. Together Edition for Eclipse features a Unified Modeling
Language (UML) environment that is natively integrated into
the Eclipse Platform. Borland Together Edition for Eclipse will be available
June 10 for Red Hat Linux 7.3 or 8.0 and Microsoft Windows 2000 (SP2 or
higher) and Windows XP Professional.

Lastly, Borland introduced Borland Together Edition for SAP NetWeaver
Studio, which, like its deal with Eclipse, is a UML development environment
for the SAP platform. The environment supports the modeling, building, and
deployment of software projects from within the SAP framework. Borland
Together Edition for SAP NetWeaver Studio will be available in August 2003
Those interested may view a trial version of the product at the SAP and
Borland booths during the JavaOne conference.