Yesterday Borland announced yet another restructuring and said it was slashing 20% of its staff — that’s around 300 positions worldwide. You can read our full news coverage of that announcement here.
Meanwhile ever since Borland Software’s incoming CEO, Tod Nielsen, said back in February that the company would spin off its developer tools business, speculation has been rife as to whether anyone would want it, and if so, who.
I for one am of the opinion that there is a lot of value in the tools business, despite the fact that it has clearly been under intense margin pressure as competition from the likes of Eclipse and other open source toolsets have largely commoditised the IDE market.
But over at Nick’s Delphi Blog (tagline “I admit it. I’m a Delphi Bigot”), a row broke out over just how much interest Borland was getting from potential bidders.
Nick took issue with Computerworld’s coverage of the ongoing bid process – or lack of bids. He didn’t like a Computerworld article with the head and sub-head, “Borland plans to sell off its faltering JBuilder Java IDE business, as well as its Windows tools platform, including Delphi, but so far nobody’s interested.”
As Nick pointed out, Borland has claimed that it has had considerable interest: as Nick writes: “Erik Frieberg says later in the article: ‘We have had, I think, over ten, I think the number is up to 12, interested parties right now looking at this. So, there’s a lot of interest there.'”
So on the announcement yesterday that Borland is now restructuring its operations (again) and in the process slashing 20% of its staff, I tried to pin down Borland’s vice president of EMEA, Paul Taylor, as to just how much interest there has been from a potential bidder for the business.
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Have there been any serious offers? “All we can say is that the divestiture is progressing as we expected, and we are hopeful of being able to announce a buyer in the next few months,” Taylor told me.
The tools spin-off, Segue acquisition and now the reorganization are all said to be part of Borland’s attempt to become more customer focused and to accelerate its application lifecycle management, or ALM, strategy. Like I say, more on that news here.
