Borland finally sells its CodeGear tools division

Borland Software has sold its CodeGear development tools division to Embarcadero Technologies for about $23 million, the companies said Wednesday.

CodeGear sells the products that Borland used to be best known for--its JBuilder Java development tool, Delphi, and C++Builder. More recently, CodeGear has created development tools for PHP and Ruby.

Borland Software CEO Tod Nielsen

Two years ago, Borland CEO Tod Nielsen announced a plan to sell off the tools division separate from its application lifecycle management product line. The tools division has been hurt from competition from free, open-source products, notably the Eclipse IDE.

CodeGear products are aimed at individual programmers, while the lifecycle management suite is designed for teams of developers, testers, and architects.

Since then, Borland hadn't been able to find a buyer.

Embarcadero brings in more than $60 million in annual revenue selling database management and design tools. The acquisition gives it access to the millions of developers that use CodeGear software, it said.

Update 7:50 AM Pacific: corrected figure for Embarcadero's annual revenue before its planned acquisition of CodeGear.

[rexworld]

Sad end for Borland tools

It's clear that there's very little value or life left in those tools. It was over two years ago that Borland first talked about selling off the tools group:

http://www.news.com/2100-1012_3-6036734.html

Two years of looking for a buyer and all they manage to scrounge up is some specialty software company willing to blow $23 million on the remains of the Borland IDE tools.

It's been a slow and lingering death for the Borland IDE tools. But I'm guessing this sale is just about the final nail in that coffin.

[LuvThatCO2]

A new life for Delphi?

Hopefully the new owners will sink the required effort into CodeGear's development tools, and not treat them like a red-headed stepchild the way borland did. For years Borland basically milked the dev tools as a way to support Borland's ALM products that no one wanted. I'm glad to see CodeGear now out from underneath Borland. Lets just hope Embarcadero isnt buyit it just to do the same.

To this day Delphi is the best native code windows development tool, and the only major (non-java) commerical competitor to MS's Visual Studio.

[Orion Blastar]

So much for the Borland Museum

that used to give away free copies of Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Turbo C++. We were hoping for a Delphi 1.0 give away from the Borland Museum.