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April 19, 2006

Borland's strange 'DevCo'

Posted 1598 days ago on April 19, 2006

Borland's Allen Bauer blogs about how DevCo will take on interns. The news itself is not interesting; what is interesting is that Bauer can say "...we've gotten approvals from the 'DevCo' board...".

What is 'DevCo'? It's the presumed new entity that will take on Borland's IDE business, including Delphi and JBuilder. A while back Borland announced that it was seeking a buyer for this part of its business. There have been no further formal announcements; the deal could be an acquisition, a split of the business to several buyers, or a new start-up.

So in what sense does 'DevCo' have a board? This sort of talk implies something like a management buy-out, but of course we can't be sure.

My second assumption is that folk like Bauer are blogging about 'DevCo' to prove that this is activity and the the IDE business is not dead. I suppose so; at the same time it doesn't really inspire confidence. VapourCorp?

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Re: Borland's strange 'DevCo'

Posted 1597 days ago by Kyle A. Miller • • www • Reply

I wondered about the "board" myself. Allen has been writing web logs on it for a while. What is the point of forming a board if you know a buyer could come in and wipe it all away?

My opinion is the IDE department wants to have a board on the ready if an investor wishes to take over operations quickly. Having a board gives the investor an option. Integrate with the one formed or throw it all out and put your own in.

This waiting period is uncomfortable.

Re: Borland's strange 'DevCo'

Posted 1597 days ago by Allen Bauer • • www • Reply

"DevCo" is merely a placeholder name used to more easily refer to the products, teams, technology involved with the IDE divestiture. If you look over some of my previous posts, I explain the reason for the "DevCo board." They are members of the current Borland executive staff, including CEO Tod Nielsen who are providing an advisory role throughout this process. Which is another key point, it is a process that takes careful planning and execution.

Meanwhile, all the teams are charging full-speed-ahead to execute on all the current product roadmaps. In fact, just earlier this week we released a second update to the BDS2006 product. We've also announced that we'll have a booth at this year's JavaOne conference and be demoing both JBuilder2006 (the currently shipping JBuilder) and the follow-on release code-named Peloton which will be the first JBuilder built on the Eclipse platform.

I encourage you and your readers to read some more of my past postings on how the whole process is proceeding. We know that a change such as this is unsettling for our customers. So we're doing everything we can to keep them as informed and up to date as possible. Development hasn't stopped. We're still growing the team. In fact we've been able to rehire a very key Borland engineer. I view all of this as clear indications of continued activity.

Oh, and Kyle, you want to talk uncomfortable? You should be in our shoes ;-)... We want to get this deal done ASAP so we can just get on with the business of building great developer focused tools and technologies without all this extra baggage.

Re: Borland's strange 'DevCo'

Posted 1596 days ago by David Intersimone "David I" • • • Reply

Hi Tim, thank you for your continued support of Borland's developer products. "DevCo" is just our internal name (it's better than saying New Company, NewCo). We are working with Borland executives and outside firms to find an investor. The plan, as Tod Nielsen has outlined it, is to keep the developer and database products as one complete entity.

In the meantime, we are operating as a division within Borland. We are driving our products forward, we have our own sales, marketing, and development teams around the world. We have an internal "board of directors" to approve requests and decisions independent of other Borland departments and to help us prepare for meetings with potential investors.

We have held several community chats to talk about what we are doing and how we are moving forward. The two of the audio replays are available on the Borland Developer Network at

http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,33440,00.html

http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,33445,00.html


Th e spin-off process takes time. It will be finished when it is finished. In the meantime, we are running our developer business, releasing updates, and working on new products following our roadmaps.

I will be travelling in Europe during May 1-18 as part of the Borland Developer Studio Spring Tour. One of our stops is in London on May 9th. As part of the agenda for each tour stop, we will be giving attendees updates about Borland, "DevCo", and Delphi. Information about the tour is available at http://www.delphi-2006.com/

Cheers!

Re: Borland's strange 'DevCo'

Posted 1595 days ago by Tim Anderson • • • Reply

Thanks DavidI and Allen. I don't doubt the commitment of you and the team; I'm looking forward to further announcements.

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