Last Thursday, David I hosted Jim Douglas (CodeGear CEO) and Wayne Williams (Embarcadero Technologies CEO), with an average 180 attending. The entire presentation is online along with the Q&A transcripts.
Jim Douglas introduced the talk telling us how he worked in the background and "in silence" to find a strategic partner for the CodeGear IDE tools, a quest that ended the day they announced the agreement by Embarcadero to buy the CodeGear asset from Borland.
I'm a developer
Wayne Williams, the future CEO of combined company, started his presentation by stating
I'm a developer! I started my career writing code, it has been a long passion of mine, I still write code and keep my fingers sharp.. in the past I've used all CodeGear products... my first large engagement in projects was written in Turbo Pascal 1.0.
That's interesting, because as far as I remember, it has been many years since Borland/Inprise/CodeGear has had a CEO with a background as programmer
More interesting points in his introduction (rephrased by myself, refer to the original presentation for the precise words):
- Goals of Thoma Cressey Bravo (Embarcadero investor): buy companies and grow them, we've doubled our R&D group.
- Systems have data and code. The combined company has tools for the "data plus code" management. We are putting together two great development teams.
- Independence is really important. Embarcadero supports all major database, we are very passionate about independence.
- Data volumes are growing at large speed, developers population is growing... we have a very sound business.
- Not a lot we can do until the deal officially closes. At first, we'll be able to do cross-selling and bundles. Idea = ER/Studio + Delphi, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
- We have an incredible opportunity to create new tools that bring code and data much closer and let them evolve together.
The Questions and Answers session was very long, detailed, and interesting. Many technical points received a vague response (as one would expect). Again, a few points worth mentioning from my point of view.
Delphi is Not Over
From the chat transcript (hear the talk at 39:20 for the detailed answer, which is much longer and really very relevant for Delphi):
Wayne: I can tell you that Delphi is absolutely not over. I personally love the product and have used it for many years. It's clearly the best RAD tool for building native Windows apps and it's a fantastic business. It's an anchor product with a very large and loyal customer base. We're going to continue to innovate, move the products forward, and attract more and more users.
Jim: I love this question. If you look at applications around the world, the need for native applications is not going away. There's this great part of the market that will always need native appliications.