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At its annual Borland Conference this week, Borland Software Corp. set out its vision for Software Delivery Optimization, which the company said will add business processes and management capabilities to its application lifecycle management strategy.
As part of the strategy, Borland announced a Worldwide Services Group that will deliver consulting, education and implementation support; an Accelerate program, which features a compilation of processes and best practices; and Borland University, a learning portal and dashboard that will go live in the first quarter of next year.
Borland also announced new products, including Star Team 2005 and CaliberRM 2005, new versions of the companys software configuration and requirements management solutions that will feature new project estimation and planning, and data mining functionality.
Under the Software Delivery Optimization strategy, Borland officials said the company will deliver a new platform called Themis that will be launched in the first half of next year and will be a role-based solution focused on project and portfolio management and other areas.
Observers said the new moves by Borland not only will provide competition for Microsoft Corp. with its upcoming Visual Studio Team System product, but also will augment the Microsoft technology. Borland is a Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner, and Rick LaPlante, general manager for Visual Studio 2005 Team System at Microsoft, was a keynote speaker at Borland Conference 2004.
Meanwhile, Borland officials touted the benefits of Diamondback, the code name for the upcoming next version of the companys Delphi application development tool. Diamondback is now in beta and supports .Net, Win32, Delphi and ASP.Net development, the company said.
In a statement, Thomas Murphy, vice president of Meta Group Inc, said, “The Software Delivery Optimization vision incrementally bridges the gaps between management, software development and operations by automating business and software development processes, so that traditional complexities become transparent. If executed on correctly, this strategy may do for software development what ERP did to the process of manufacturing.”
However not all observers were so positive. “Borland is clearly taking some steps to better address the challenges of distributed development,” said VA Software Corp.s senior vice president, product development, Colin Bodell. “However, anyone who has ever managed a large development organization knows that getting every member of the team to use the same tools is like herding cats. To genuinely meet the varied needs of large organizations, a software development platform must be integration-ready and support a heterogeneous mix of tools, both commercial and open source.”
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