Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Borland Software on Tuesday
made another move on the acquisition front, shelling out $185 million in
cash and stock to purchase TogetherSoft Corp.
Just two weeks after gobbling
up Starbase and the assets of Sweden-based BoldSoft, Borland said the
TogetherSoft acquisition would expand its JBUilder suite and Together’s
ControlCenter products, which is aimed at developers looking to debug
complex applications.
TogetherSoft’s flagship ControlCenter platform supports Java, C++, IDL,
Visual Basic 6, Visual Basic .NET, and C# within a single product and with
Borland jockeying
for position in the application server market share race, industry
watchers view the deal making strategy as the logical step for the software
development firm.
With the deal, which combines $82.5 million in cash and issuing of 9.05
million shares, Borland also gets the low-end Together Solo product set,
which targets solo developers and small businesses. Together Solo includes
the basic features of Together ControlCenter (UML diagram editor,
programming editor, GoF and other patterns, and simultaneous round-trip
engineering for Java, C++, C#, VB 6, VB .NET, and IDL) but does not offer
ContolCenter’s advanced features.
On a conference call Tuesday, Borland CEO Dale Fuller said the company would
continue investing in both Borland JBuilder and ControlCenter products and
beef up support for TogetherSoft’s strategy of offering design and analysis
solutions that work with IDEs. Over the next 12 months, the plan is to take
the product lines from the two companies and create a “common and shared
underlying technology platform,” he said.
Borland also assumes about 390 employees from Raleigh, North Carolina-based
TogetherSoft and more than 4,000 customers worldwide. Borland said
TogetherSoft generated approximately $51 million in revenues over the last
four quarters and the deal gives it a firm footing in the American and
Europe.
News of Borland’s shopping spree comes amidst reports that the company’s
Kylix cross-platform development product would push Web Services
capabilities to the Linux platform. According to published reports,
Borland plans to use Ximian Inc’s Project Mono in Kylix, creating the
potential for Microsoft Windows developers to move .NET applications to
Linux.
Mono is an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s
.NET libraries and other technologies. Kylix allows Delphi and C++
programmers to compile code to either Windows or Linux.
Borland also released a new version its InterBase embedded database.
Updated features include multiprocessor support and connection monitoring.
