The application lifecycle management (ALM) specialist is taking a $250,000-a-year-seat as a strategic developer on the Eclipse board, moving up from the group’s fringes as a plug-in provider. Borland will commit eight developers to Eclipse.
Borland is also taking the lead on a project that would add modeling to Eclipse’s ALM project roster while plans are afoot for Borland to put bread-and-butter tools from its Core Software Development Platform (Core SDP) on the Eclipse rich client architecture. Core SDP consists of Together, CaliberRM and Optimizeit.
Borland is the latest tools ISV to throw itself into Eclipse. Last week, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) partner BEA Systems Inc announced it is joining, also as a strategic level developer, while taking over the joint lead on the Web Tools Project (WTP).
The WTP is designed to simplify development of web application using J2EE.
Borland’s decision follows nearly three years spent on the Eclipse sidelines as an add-in provider. Borland’s initial membership of Eclipse came about by accident, with the purchase of Unified Modeling Language (UML) expert Together an Eclipse co-founder.
Borland was unwilling to take more of an active role while Eclipse was under founder the control of founder and Java tools rival IBM Corp. IBM, though, spun-out Eclipse as an independent organization a year ago while the group has succeeded in attracting members like SAP AG and Intel Corp, which have actively participated and helped further dilute IBM’s presence inside the group.
Borland senior vice president of product marketing Erik Frieberg said of the change: [Eclipse] was controlled by IBM. Now it’s a representative industry organization and we felt it was time to join at the highest level.
Deeper involvement, though in Eclipse on an architecture basis will also increase Borland’s potential addressable market. Putting Core SDP on the Eclipse rich client architecture will enable third party plug-ins written for Eclipse to snap-in-to in, expanding Borland’s own functionality. Eclipse also means Borland’s tools can potential work with environments ported to the Eclipse architecture like SAP’s NetWeaver, without the need for expensive and time-consuming customization work.
Frieberg said the growing presence Eclipse has made it important for Borland to join. We need to take more of a strong stance on Eclipse, Frieberg said.
Eclipse executive director Mike Milinkovich Borland’s participation, particularly through the as-yet-unnamed application modeling project would help strengthen and support Eclipse’s value as an environment to manage the lifecycle of an application.
He added, Borland’s presence also helped improved Eclipse’s credibility as an independent organization.
Borland’s decision to join leaves just Sun Microsystems Inc as the only major Java player outside of Eclipse. While Sun is unlikely to join, instead backing its own rather limited NetBeans open source project, the company is likely to come under renewed pressure to join and either dump NetBeans or bring the project across.
