Borland Software Corp. last week moved to bolster its presence in the government market by teaming with a federal integrator.
The Scotts Valley, Calif., company announced a partnership with Spectrum Systems Inc., of Fairfax, Va. In the deal, Spectrum will add Borlands ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) products to its GSA (General Services Administration) Schedule. The GSA Schedule is a buying vehicle or contract that enables government customers to purchase more than 4 million products and services directly from 8,600 commercial suppliers, according to federal officials.
Officials from both companies said the deal will allow government customers to avoid vendor lock-in when developing and maintaining software systems. The software development tool makers lock-in reference is aimed at IBM, which earlier this year acquired Rational Software Corp., a leading competitor to Borland in its ALM tools space.
Spectrum officials said the company has replaced Rationals tools with Borlands on the companys GSA Schedule. “We previously offered Rational Software products but found the superior integration and technology neutrality of Borland products more complementary to our application development services,” said Ronald Segal, president and chief executive of Spectrum, in a statement.
Elizabeth Gage, director of business development at Spectrum, said, “We are only offering Borlands products” but added, “We still support our customers who purchased the Rational tools.” However, Gage said Spectrum has not sold Rationals tools for nearly three years.
Input Inc., a government market analysis company based in Reston, Va., projects that the federal government will spend approximately $5 billion on e-government initiatives.
Spectrum said it will work with Borlands federal sales office in Washington. The government reseller and integrator will add all Borlands ALM products to its Together, CaliberRM and StarTeam software design and management tools. In effect, this 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 focus on three areas that affect government software practices: faulty software, cross- platform development and the leveraging of existing investments in software systems. A Borland spokeswoman said the companys products address these issues directly.