Borland plans to integrate TeraQuest’s expertise, encapsulated in templates for activities such as change management, project planning and requirements gathering, into its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools, processes and services.
The acquisition also means Borland takes ownership of Bill Curtis and Charlie Webber, co-authors of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) that is the basis for many of today’s software development best practices, including Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute’s stringent Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).
Curtis has been appointed to the newly created Borland position of Chief Process Officer, to help move Borland’s software and services closer towards the CMM model. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Dale Fuller, Borland CEO (CEO), told ComputerWire the business side of customers’ organizations would have a better idea of the kind of benefits they could accrue from a software development project, by marrying CMM and Borland’s tools.
If you draw a line through the methodologies to the tools and the processes, you have a way to manage all these things… it’s tying a lot of lose things together, Fuller said.
Borland has been pushing process-based development around its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools since last year announcing the Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) strategy. SDO is an attempt to provide business users with a greater understanding of, and visibility into, the software development cycle, from budgeting to software delivery and management. Borland believes this will help companies deliver projects on time and within budget to meet their needs.
Chris Barbin, Borland’s senior vice president of worldwide services, said Borland selected TeraQuest, instead of any other services company using CMM, for a number of reasons.
These include the company’s level of experience, with 11 out of 25 staff are already qualified in CMM, in addition to TeraQuest’s customer base TeraQuest serves Fortune 200 organizations including EDS, McKesson, Telcordia and Ericsson.
The TeraQuest deal is Borland’s fist corporate acquisition, since buying TogetherSoft Corp, Starbase Corp and BoldSoft MDE AB in late 2002 to convert its suite of development tools into an ALM portfolio.
