The incredible shrinking Borland International Inc is a little smaller now it has off-loaded all future development, marketing sales and support of its Paradox database software to the ever-ambitious Corel Corp. Corel now has a perpetual license to all current and past version of the software and will do all future development work at its base in Ottawa, Canada. And the bell soon looks like tolling for Borland’s lower-end dBase database, that it acquired from Ashton-Tate five years ago. The Scotts Valley, California company said it has a 32-bit Windows 95 version in the final stages of development, tentatively called version 6.0. Borland is not looking at any dates or attaching any marketing resources to it though, so presumably somebody else will have to. It’s in a kind of fluid situation, at the moment, the company added and finally conceded that it was likely not be a Borland-branded product when it finally arrives. The deal with Corel means the Canadian has the right to do whatever it wants with the engine, including integrating it into other products if its so chooses. But it does not own the source code, and Borland will continue to receive license fees royalties, but of course neither company was saying how much that might be. There will be a new version of Paradox from Corel early next year, according to Eid Eid, Corel’s VP engineering. All he would say about the rev was that it would have extensive Web development capabilities. There are no plans to re-write Paradox in Java at the moment, as the company has done with its WordPerfect suite. Eid said the object On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) engine would be hard to write in Java. No staff are moving between the companies, though Corel is looking for between five and 40,engineering staff, most already with the company, for its team. Effective immediately, all customer service, development, sales and marketing will be handled by Corel, and Borland will support the product until November 21. Borland says it will continue to develop and sell stand-alone versions of the engine to its existing corporate customers.
