May 7, 2008
CodeGear, Borland's division specialized in development tools like Delphi and JBuilder, is being acquired by Embarcadero technology.
The news is floating around the web, moving from blog to blog, and sparkling newsgroup discussions... and will be like this for some time.
Embarcadero Technology, the company behind database management tools like ER/studio and DBArtisan, has signed an agreement with Borland to buy CodeGear, the division focused on development tools like Delphi and JBuilder (plus some database properties). I haven't seen the amount mentioned, but I have read only a fraction of the white papers and announcements... will read more and post more comments over the coming hours. Update: It was actually quite prominent, "approximately 23 million USD".
My initial reaction? Quite positive I have to say. The two companies have a similar audience (even if Embarcadero probably sells more to larger development shops), similar tools, a similar independence and cross-platform appeal, and even a similar look and feel in the web sites (which might not be a coincidence!) Many Delphi developers I know already use Embarcadero tools for managing their larger databases. The products are quite a good fit. And there are even quite a few Borland/CodeGear managers who moved to Embarcadero over the last few months...
I was expecting more of a "financial investment" than an acquisition, but (in reality) this is not far from it. Embarcadero was a public company bought by a financial investor, and CodeGear will become a privately held company (or part of a privately held company) as well. No more excuses for having a detailed roadmap, now.
I like the idea of working closely with the "largest, independent software provider"... but we'll have to see how things evolve. Blog again soon...
posted by
marcocantu @ 5:08PM | 14 Comments
[0 Pending]
14 Comments
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
Not quite the size of the purchaser that I expected
last year. But after all the uncertainty finally
Codegear will have a parent company that can push it
to the future. In a few months we will see
Embarcadero strategy for Codegear products, and
hopefully Delphi and the new promising products for
PHP and Ruby will have more development resources to
raise them to leadership again.
Comment by ctrev on May 7, 17:37
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
we'll see what happens, this doesn't generate any
interest
my first impression... the embarcadero page failed to
load =o(
Comment by Eber Irigoyen
[http://ebersys.blogspot.com]
on May 7, 19:59
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
If my math is not so bad, CodeGear has been sold at a
very low price. Yahoo is worth for 44 billion but
CodeGear only for 0.023 billion. BOrland, what are you
thinking about...
Comment by stanleyxu
[http://stanleyxu2005.blogspot.com]
on May 7, 21:19
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
[Wanted to post this to the Borland newsgroups first,
but I'm still banned over there.]
I'm sceptical.
There is nothing wrong with a small shop buying
CodeGear. Actually that would have been by dream
scenario: A small company that really knows about
Delphi (one of the bigger component vendors or
partners, for example) buys CodeGear, fires all the
"management" and "evangelists" and basically everyone
who destroyed Delphi's market share and customer
satisfaction during the last years by constantly
ignoring what those customers want.
A small company that then does a customer survey, and
invests some money to form a development team that is
actually able to deliver in time what customers have
been asking for for years, and is able to catch up on
7 years of falling behind the competition.
It doesn't look this way. For now, it could very well
be that Embarcadero is just interested into some
single Java asset of CodeGear. Or interested
in a few of the remaning skilled developers. Most
people in the Delphi community won't ever have heard
about them.
Probably now would be a good time for "would have only
listened to me and other partners instead of
humiliating us", pointing my finger at the lousy 23M
value that has been left. But actually that's not the
mood I'm in. I'm sad. I'm sad that a bunch
of incompetent CEOs and managers managed to largely
destroy what one has been the biggest programming
community in the world, the best running commercial
component market, with a gigantic base of partners and
fans.
I won't hold my breath. But the only hope for Delphi
I've left is that during the next days and weeks
someone from Embarcadero actually tries to get into
contact with CodeGears customers and partners,
including those partners CodeGear has scared or
humiliated during the last years.
The best thing Embarcadero could do is NOT to ask
those who have been in control during the last years
what to do, no evangalists, no product managers. Ask
those who might actually be willing to pay money again
once they get what they are asking for.
Simon
Comment by Simon Kissel
[http://crosskylix.untergrund.net]
on May 7, 22:01
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
30 millon dollars??? that's really cheap! pretty weird
uh?...
i hope the "goodbye borland" dont became a "goodbye
delphi"...
Comment by Javier Santo Domingo
[http://codegear.com]
on May 7, 23:46
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
30 million dollars isn't a lot, but might help Borland
remain alive for some more time... meanwhile we have
once more (or probably for the first time ever) a
company focused on developers.
Simon, I only partially agree with you, as for me
CodeGear is quite different from what Borland was a
few years back, and I see a lot of "listening" and
"feedback" on their side... getting into the products.
I know your experience has been difference. I
appreciate you shared your views.
Comment by Marco Cantù
[http://www.marcocantu.com]
on May 8, 00:20
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
Marco,
agreed, I see that too. But I also see that each time
we've seen this listen->getting into products cycle,
it more or less went down a complicated
listen->ignore->listen->complete
denial->listen->ignore->listen->accept->delay->delay->delay->getting
into products route ;)
It took some people inside CodeGear extremely long to
accept obvious things (like the need for Unicode that
they now finally have implemented, and the need for
Win64 which is in the delay-phase (not to mention the
cross-platform stuff ;)).
The turnaround times between customer requirements and
actually getting something into a working product are
far too long. Probably this is also related to the
understaffing of their team, but to me it's most
definitely an issue of making customer requests a top
priority. And denying customers surveys for up 2 years
before finally admitting the customer was right is
even worse in this fast-moving business.
And no matter what the reasons are: They still are
nowhere near having a chance to catch up, but keep
falling behind instead.
That's why I think that a new owner telling them "you
are doing a good job" would be dangerous. While
individuals at CodeGear sure might do a good job, as a
whole, the job done is incredibly bad when it comes to
securing Delphi's market space. Let's face it:
Probably the bigger chunk of Delphi users completely
refuse to buy their new Delphi versions. It's pretty
hard to do a worse job than having your customers tell
you "your 8-year old product version was better" ;)
IMHO this process would need to be totally changed to
something like:
a) What do customers want and by when do they need it?
b) What is this going to cost us?
c) How many developers do we need to get it done in
that time?
d) What revenue (short and long-time) is this going to
bring us?
if b>d then get funding, employ developers, produce,
deliver, get revenue, be happy.
CodeGear in the past has been extremely far from that.
And for this to change, the new owner would have to
actually find out that the reasons why Delphi isn't a
key player anymore is not due to complex market
changes, but simply to previous management failing to
manage trivial aspects like the above.
Sure my opinions are based on my very negative
experience how CodeGear has treated critical partners,
but still: IMHO all visions, strategies and especially
time schedules CodeGear has created should be thrown
away, and a new well-planned and funded strategy
should be found after intense communication with the
customer base.
Comment by Simon Kissel
[http://crosskylix.untergrund.net]
on May 8, 00:47
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
Simon,
"The turnaround times between customer requirements
and actually getting something into a working product
are far too long" -> Well, that's because they "lost"
almost 5 years of Delphi Win32 development investing
in Linux and .NET versions (although I don't really
fully regret either of them)
"denying customers surveys for up 2 years" -> yes but
now they are listening, more than the average software
company, imho
"Probably the bigger chunk of Delphi users completely
refuse to buy their new Delphi versions. It's pretty
hard to do a worse job than having your customers tell
you your 8-year old product version was better" -> I
disagree on this one, for me the issue is that the
newer versions might have too little extra features to
justify the upgrade, although after most developers
look into them and see how easy is it to move existing
applications over, they easily buy a new copy (this
happened to me yesterday at a real company 20+
developers , for example)
I think your approach is weak in some areas. Not all
customers want the same, so you cannot simply listen
to all of them. They also want to pay very little, and
even simple feature have an implementation + QA +
documentation + installation + support cost, that can
be easily underestimated.
But again, thanks for sharing your POV. Let's hope
this deal implies larger and longer terms investments
in more cross-platform development tools with Object
Pascal behind them (and not only Java and dynamic
languages)...
Comment by Marco Cantù
[http://www.marcocantu.com]
on May 8, 01:00
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
Marco,
true, it's not that easy as a)-d) ;)
Still: As we both know Borland/CodeGear had the tools
to find out what their customers wanted in lots of
different ways (including ways to find out what those
willing to spend more wanted). Commercial component
vendor partners, customer surveys, QualityCentral.
These sources weren't used enough, and the results
were ignored if they didn't fit their vision (whatever
that may have been).
Let's keep our fingers crossed that Embarcadero will
have more success at working on visions and plans
together with their customers, and getting the
required funding and resources to make Delphi
competitive again.
Cheers,
Simon
Comment by Simon Kissel
[http://crosskylix.untergrund.net]
on May 8, 01:24
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
The biggest fear that Delphi developers are likely to
have is the lack of knowledge of who Embarcadero are,
their vision, how CodeGear products will be treated in
relationship to their own, etc.
Despite the many failures of Borland in managing the
potential of Delphi, CodeGear as an independent
company was able to move it forward in such a way that
appeared, at least to me, as something they were
serious about revitalizing. Now maybe much of this
was perception and not reality. But it sure didn't hurt.
I agree that the purchase price was way lower than I
was expecting. But from what I understand quarterly
revenue and profits that CodeGear had been generating,
it would seem to me that they can repay this
acquisition cost quickly and hopefully do it without
losing too many key staff.
But hey, its not my company. Its up to them what they
do. I just think all of us customers would like to
get some idea of what the future may hold, since we
are all betting on futures in the computer industry.
Myles
Comment by Myles
[http://www.techsolusa.com]
on May 8, 01:52
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
Venal Sods, nothing to say or deal with anymore
Comment by PapaQ on May 8, 16:10
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
Sayonara, my lovely Delphi, finally I fear. I had
just upgraded and got Marco's book, so sad. I'm
thinking back at Nantucket's Clipper I did so well
with, until Computer Associates bought and killed
it. I'm thinking back at Zortech's C++, which
Borland did some great things with, only to be out-
sold and C++ finally ruined by Microsoft. Hopefully
there's that connection between Delphi and C# still,
that's where I'll have to go. Can't beat the 800-lb
gorillas. Programming used to be so fun!
Comment by Don Ridgway
[http://www.customusa.com]
on May 8, 22:20
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
Delphi users, no need to worry. We are a tools
company at heart, have a fanatically loyal customer
base, and we are passionate about what we do. We
want to grow this company and we will do that by
keeping customers and partners happy. We have
announced an acquisition that brings together two
great and profitable tools companies. Our plan is to
invest in the CodeGear products and people. Proof
point? Since going private, we have doubled our
development staff with new employees. These 100+
people are developers that we now have enhancing
ER/Studio, Rapid SQL, DBArtisan, etc....as well as
innovating new products like PowerSQL
(http://www.embarcadero.com/products/products.html).
CodeGear has found a good home. Stay tuned, I think
you'll like what you see.
greg davoll
vp of marketing, embarcadero technologies
Comment by greg davoll on May 12, 21:23
Goodbye Borland, Welcome Embarcadero
In February CodeGear received about 100 mln $ from
Russian goverment (national project Education, ONE
MILLION copies of Delphi and C++Builder). And there
was a joke in Russia - should we now call CodeGear
GazPromSoftware?
Marco, what do you think about united Embarcadero-
CodeGear perspectives on Russian and Chines markets?
Comment by Figaro2000 on May 21, 09:44
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