One-time troubled Borland International Inc has acquired Object Request Broker stalwart Visigenic Software Inc in what it says represents the next step in its turnaround initiative, the first step being to restore the business to profitability. The Scott’s Valley software development company says that buying Visigenic will give it long term growth opportunities by providing it with leading-edge technology for managing distributed objects. The acquisition is a stock-for-stock transaction under which Visigenic stockholders will receive 0.81988 of a share of Borland stock for each outstanding Visigenic share. With Borland re-positioning itself as a supplier of object-oriented, component-based development environments and middleware, the acquisition will give it Visigenic’s ORB Object Request Broker to add to its existing technologies, enabling developers to deploy distributed applications on multiple systems including Windows, Unix, AS/400 and MVS. Borland says its objective is to support all major standards for distributed computing including Microsoft Corp’s COM, DCOM/COM+ and ActiveX, and Visigenic adds to this its CORBA Common Object Request Broker expertise. Founded by Informix Software Inc founder Roger Sippl, Visigenic saw half year losses fall to $6.2m from $15.9m last year on revenue up 51% at $11.8m (CI No 3,273). It has seen considerable success in licensing its Visibroker technology to third parties, including Oracle Corp, Netscape Communications Inc and Sybase Inc, and Borland says it is keen to harness this momentum and continue it. Sippl, Visigenic’s founder, chairman and chief executive, will become Borland’s chief technology officer, and Rick LeFaivre, the present incumbent becomes president of research and development for the combined operation. Borland said it will keep a development site at Visigenic’s San Mateo headquarters.
