Hungry Micro Focus Eats Borland Cadaver (and More)
Published May 7th, 2009 Under News, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Borland Software Corporation announced that Micro Focus International plc and Borland have entered into a definitive agreement under which Micro Focus will acquire all the outstanding shares of Borland in a cash merger transaction. Micro Focus will acquire each outstanding share of common stock of Borland for $1.00 per share, representing a premium of 25% over the closing share price of Borland’s common stock on May 5, 2009 of $0.80 and a premium of approximately 67% over the average thirty trading day closing price of $0.60. The aggregate transaction value is approximately $75 million.
In January, we asked the question “Will Borland Survive Yet Another Crisis?“, now we have the answer. And it is negative. After selling its development tools to Embarcadero in May 2008 and loosing 15% of its workforce and its CEO in January, Borland makes a final step to cancel 26 years of existence as a vendor of software development tools. Best know for its original Cobol product, Microfocus expands with this acquisition its portfolio of software development tools. The same day, it acquired the automated testing products of Compuware.
It remains to be seen what will Micro Focus will do technically with Borland products, that are also mostly the results of former Borland acquisitions, and Compuware solutions. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of overlaps between the new tools and the previous solutions sold by Micro Focus. You could think that Borland and Compuware testing tools are operating on the same market, but most of the Compuware quality offer is targeting the mainframe.
Micro Focus is profitable according to its last detailed financial statements issued in 2008. It is also used to integrate acquisitions as it purchased last year NetManage and Liant in June and July. With these two new purchases, Micro Focus gains access to a new customer portfolio. Consolidating the acquired sales and support organizations with it own staff (or in more crude words: “firing people”), it could achieve what Borland was missing these recent years: profits. The deal could bring short term relief to Borland customers as it lifts uncertainties about the support organization. It remains to be seen if Micro Focus will develop significantly the acquired products or if it will just harvest the revenues from the maintenance fees.
Software Development Training Survey: Between Ugly and Good
Published April 27th, 2009 Under Numbers, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Our question was: How many weeks of training have you followed on average the past 3 years??
| None | 23% |
| Less than one week | 19% |
| One week (5 days) | 15% |
| One to two weeks | 18% |
| Two weeks to one month | 8% |
| More than one month | 17% |
Number of participants: 258
Ending date: April 2009 Read more
Oracle Buys Sun: What Will Happen Next?
Published April 20th, 2009 Under News, Software Development | Leave a Comment
SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 20, 2009. Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. The price represents a 42 percent premium to Sun’s Friday closing stock price of $6.69. This acquisition came after Sun broke negotiations with IBM, which was offering $9.40 per share.
Sun Press release said “There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris.” I think that this last sentence will reflect the main point of this purchase, as far as software developers are concerned. In his quest for getting a more important share of the software infrastructure of companies, Oracle acquires mainly a programming expertise and operating system that should complement its application and databases solutions. The hardware part should also allow Oracle to offer a complete optimized hardware and software solution to its customers, even if, due to Sun smaller market share, Oracle has to be friendly with its other hardware partners like HP or Dell. Acquiring Sun, Oracle also increase its expertise in the Java middleware area, after the acquisition last year of BEA Systems.
The other fact which is contained in Sun press release sentence, or I should say which is omitted, is MySQL. Sun acquired MySQL in January 2008, as a way to boost its software offer. MySQL has been for a long time an important issue for Oracle, as it was a big competitor in the lower end of the market for databases. With this acquisition, Oracle has the possibility of “quietly” killing the MySQL development process and offer the current MySQL paying customer an opportunity to migrate towards its own database product. I don’t see Oracle maintaining two database product lines, especially if one is mainly “given away” for free. Even if existing Oracle customers may not be tempted by MySQL, this new database was always in consideration for startups. There were also some companies that tried to build upon MySQL the missing tools to bring it close to the power of Oracle products.
We expect a similar fate, silent slow death through lower financial support, for mainly of the other Sun’s technologies: NetBeans, GlassFish, JavaFX or OpenOffice. Oracle always want to get the most of the financial aspect of acquisitions and spending money on open source projects and technology that has low immediate return on investment is not something that it would consider, unless it could be used as a tactical weapon against some of its competitors, like Microsoft or SAP for instance.
Sun Press Release
http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp
Confessions of a Serial Product Owner
Published April 20th, 2009 Under Books, Methods & Tools, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Anna Fors gave me the opportunity to host “Confessions of a Serial Product Owner” on DevAgile.com. This free e-book is a short guide to a business person aiming for becoming an excellent Scrum product owner. A further iteration of the experiences of Anna as a product owner will be published in the next edition of Methods & Tools.
Between the Magic Quadrant and the Bermuda Triangle
Published March 26th, 2009 Under Software Development | 2 Comments
Software vendors are always proud to communicate evaluations from research companies that indicate how good their products are. These ratings are to the software development tools market what the gastronomic guides are for restaurants. You always wonder what is their exact credibility, as relationships between analysts and vendors are not always neutral. You have also witness a lot of “pilot projects” from inside “technology staff” failing to discover how a product really impacts the work of developers and know that evaluating products out of a real context is difficult. Anyway, there are still a lot of people that will use them as a base for their purchase decision. A good position in these evaluations is something sought after, especially by smaller and young companies, as it could be a driver for their future growth. Technology is however only one component of the success equation, as we know that the best products are not always inside the most successful companies. No I didn’t say Microsoft ;o)
Even if the role of these external assessments is still important for the software development market, the rules have certainly changed these recent years. The software tool eco-system has evolved and the relationships between software tools vendors and developers have been transformed, both in their form and in their content. Read more
« go back — keep looking »