Borland International Inc changed its name to Inprise Corp yesterday, in an effort to show its customers that it is no longer just a supplier of desktop programming tools. At the same time, the company set out a somewhat vague technology roadmap, touching on its plans to introduce an application server product within this calendar year. Tired of being labeled as a struggling tools developer, and after five consecutive quarters of growth and four consecutive profitable quarters, combined with a new push towards large enterprise customers, it has ditched its name of 14 years in favor of the internet-enterprise combination. It says it won’t abandon the 3 million individual developers that made its (original) name, and will continue to develop professional programming tools under the Borland brand. The name change came into effect yesterday, but Borland/Inprise will continue to trade under the BORL symbol until June 5th, once shareholder approval has been sought, when the new letters will become INPR. Along with its new makeover, the company is developing an Inprise Application Server product, with which it hopes to provide its big customers with a Corba-based infrastructure on which to base their distributed multi-tier applications. With its Visigenics acquisition finally completed earlier this week, Borland plans to use the VisiBroker Corba technology as the cornerstone for the Inscape Application Server, and will integrate its Jbuilder, Delphi and C++Builder tools with the new software. It all sounds like bad news for Entera, the DCE/RPC-based middleware product Borland acquired from Open Environment Corp back in November 1996, even though the new Borland insists it will keep developing the product and has DCE- to-Corba bridge products in place. Borland has some big customers committed to Entera, and can’t be seen to be abandoning them. But its strategic direction is clearly Corba, and that leaves those customers facing a transition at some time in the future, with the option of shifting to competitive application server products. Entera’s AppCenter application management software is to be re-focused towards Corba. Also to be integrated within the Inprise Application Server will be CIX and Tuxedo transaction management services (currently in beta), security, web access, and access to enterprise applications such as SAP. Mainframe support for the Visibroker technology is also planned. It’s all language independent, though with a bias towards Java that sees Borland committing to Enterprise Java Beans – which will emerge most immediately with the next release of its Java development tool JBuilder 2, now released to manufacturing and due for its official launch in two weeks time. To cope with the increased complexity of the applications development its large customers are working on, Borland also launched a new professional services organization yesterday, integrating consulting, training and technical support resources into a single worldwide organization. The plan is to double its services revenues to 20%, though no timescale for that was given. Del Yocam, Borland’s CEO and president said he wanted to see the company – which we will try from now on to call Inprise – to reach $500m in revenues within three years, through both internal growth and acquisition.
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