The tumultuous history of Borland is a reflection of the last 30 years of the information technology industry. Born as a result of a product called "Turbo Pascal," which was the Ruby on Rails of its day, Borland has attempted to redefine itself each time it lost when going head-to-head with Microsoft. The most recent concession was the detachment of its developer IDEs, consisting of the once mighty Delphi (Turbo Pascal's successor) and JBuilder (one of the best Java IDEs before Eclipse commoditized the entire IDE market).
Realizing the erosion of its once-core business, Borland swam upstream toward the more lucrative—but considerably more competitive—Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools market. Not only would this break Borland out of its Microsoft operating-system dependency, but it would also let Borland apply its lower cost approach to the traditionally high-priced ALM tools market.
Besides offering more competitively priced alternatives compared to other ALM tool vendors, Borland's latest direction has zeroed in on a problem that has plagued the expensive and highly proprietary ALM market since its inception. At first, the proprietary approaches were developed simply because no standard means of integrating all the moving parts of the software development process existed. In fact, the whole idea of ALM was (and some would argue, still is) in flux, further justifying the proprietary approaches adopted by ALM vendors. Now that the ALM process is generally understood and accepted, enough of the workflow has been codified into a predictable, repeatable process that the initial proprietary argument is looked upon with disdain as simply a way for these dominant ALM software proprietors to lock customers to their expensive license agreements. Seeing this as a major pain point, Borland has reengineered its software tools market approach to alleviate that pain.
