Borland Moves Deeper Into Federal Sector

Borland Software Corp. Monday moved to bolster its presence in the federal market by teaming with Spectrum Systems Inc.

Borland Software Corp. Monday moved to bolster its presence in the federal market by teaming with a federal integrator.

Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Borland announced a partnership with Spectrum Systems Inc., Fairfax, Va., whereby Spectrum will add Borlands Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) products to Spectrums General Services Administration Schedule. The GSA schedule is a buying vehicle or contract that enables government customers to directly purchase more than 4 million products and services from 8,600 commercial suppliers, according to federal sources.

Officials from both companies said the deal will address the needs of government customers to avoid vendor lock-in when developing and maintaining software systems. The software development toolmakers "lock-in" reference is aimed directly at IBM Corp., which six months ago acquired Rational Software Corp., a leading competitor to Borland in its ALM tools space. Borland officials say the company is the only major independent tools supplier.

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In fact, Spectrum said it replaced Rationals tools with Borlands on the companys GSA Schedule. In a statement, Ronald Segal, president and chief executive of Spectrum said: "We previously offered Rational Software products, but found the superior integration and technology neutrality of Borland products more complementary to our application development services."

Elizabeth Gage, director business development at Spectrum, said, "We are only offering Borlands products." But she added, "We still support our customers who purchased the Rational tools." However, Gage said Spectrum has not sold Rationals tools for nearly three years now.

Input Inc., a Reston, Va.-based government market analysis firm, projects that the federal government will spend around $5 billion on e-government initiatives.

Spectrum will work with Borlands federal sales office in Washington, the company said. And the government reseller and integrator will add all of Borlands ALM products to the Together, CaliberRM and StarTeam software design and management tools it has offered to this point. That means Spectrum will offer Borlands JBuilder, Delphi Studio, C++Builder, Optimizeit and Borland Enterprise Server, among other products, to its government customers.

Borland said it is planning to attack three trends impacting the governments software practices: faulty, buggy software; cross-platform development; and leveraging existing investments in software systems. A Borland spokeswoman said the companys products address these issues directly.

Meanwhile, Borland also announced Monday that Raytheon Co., Lexington, Mass., is using Borland software to build and deploy the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). Borland officials said the polar-orbiting environmental remote sensing satellite system will be used for civilian, military and scientific weather forecasting and data collection.

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