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Borland Softwares CodeGear development tools unit has changed leadership, naming Jim Douglas, a veteran of the high-tech industry, to the position of chief executive officer.
Douglas succeeds Ben Smith, who was named CodeGears CEO when the unit officially spun off from Borland in November of last year.
Smith, who was brought on for his ability to foster startups through their initial phases and broker deals, has decided to step aside to return to the private equity, acquisition and venture arena, CodeGear officials said. Smith had been onboard with the CodeGear team, then known as “DevCo” internally, in a consulting capacity since February 2006.
Borland reported that its Developer Tools Group, now known as CodeGear, an independent subsidiary of the company, earned $75.7 million last year. CodeGear is based in Scotts Valley, Calif.
Meanwhile, Douglas most recently was president and CEO of ReShape, an electronic design automation startup backed by the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. Douglas led the companys transition from an engineering-services firm to a software-business model. These efforts resulted in the sale of the company to Magma Design Automation.
Before joining ReShape, Douglas was vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Tality, a design-services company that was launched as a spin-off of Cadence Design Systems. Douglas experience also includes eight years at Cadence in various senior management roles, including vice president of product marketing, with global responsibility for Cadences segment-leading, $950-million software business.
A CodeGear official said Smith was brought on to get CodeGear off the ground, and Douglas is focused on helping the division move to the next level of gaining share on its competitors.
Since becoming a separate entity, CodeGear has released series-development tools including JBuilder 2007, an enterprise-class IDE (integrated development environment) built on the Eclipse open-source platform; Delphi for PHP, an integrated visual RAD (Rapid Application Development) environment for the popular PHP Web-development language; and Delphi 2007 for Win32, a new version of the RAD environment with new support for Microsoft Windows Vista and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).